Sarah stared at the divorce papers on her kitchen table, their crisp legal formatting a stark contrast to the scattered academic papers and coffee-stained journals that had become her constant companions. David's signature was already there, neat and decisive as always. He'd had them delivered by courier rather than coming himself. That was probably for the best.

They'd met at a hackathon, of all places. Sarah had been there recruiting for the Digital Humanities project, trying to find programmers interested in helping map ancient trade routes. David had wandered over to her booth during a break, more interested in the cup of decent coffee she'd brought from off-campus than in her pitch about Sanskrit manuscripts. She'd found herself charmed by his methodical questions about her work, the way he immediately started breaking down complex historical patterns into flowcharts and decision trees.

"You make the past sound like a debugging problem," she'd told him.

"Isn't it?" He'd grinned, sketching out a quick diagram. "You've got your initial conditions, your major state changes, your edge cases where things don't work like they're supposed to..."

They'd ended up talking until the venue staff started stacking chairs around them. David had walked her back to her office, still excitedly discussing ways to apply network analysis to historical trade patterns. She'd found his enthusiasm infectious, his tendency to approach everything like a solvable puzzle oddly reassuring.

Two years later, he'd proposed using a decision matrix, laying out all the logical reasons they should get married. Sarah had laughed and said yes before he could finish his PowerPoint presentation. Even then, she'd loved the way his analytical mind complemented her more intuitive approach to understanding the world.

The kitchen still held traces of that life - the expensive coffee maker David had insisted on buying, the family photos he'd meticulously arranged on the wall, the height chart where they'd marked Li-mei's growth in careful pencil strokes. Three and a half years' worth of measurements, ending abruptly. Sarah had caught David erasing them one night, six months after they lost her. When she'd asked him why, he'd said they needed to "move forward." They'd had their first real fight that night.

She thought about the day the hospital released them, their daughter's empty bed folded away with mechanical efficiency. David had immediately started talking about grief counselors, support groups, all the proper steps they should take. He'd made spreadsheets tracking their healing process, scheduled appropriate intervals for dealing with Li-mei's things, researched the statistical progression of parental bereavement. Ever the software engineer, trying to debug their grief.

But while Sarah had lost herself in research and patterns, David had disappeared into rage. The first sign had been the argument with Li-mei's oncologist in the hospital parking lot. Then came the late-night emails to hospital administrators, demanding reviews of every decision, every test, every medication. He'd started showing up at medical board meetings, armed with spreadsheets documenting what he saw as systematic failures.

His work had suffered. The man who'd built his career on careful logic and attention to detail began making mistakes. Simple ones at first - misplaced semicolons, incorrect variable names. Then bigger ones. The day he pushed code that crashed their payment processing system, costing the company thousands in lost transactions, his team lead had suggested he take some time off.

David had exploded. Sarah still winced remembering the call from HR, asking her to pick him up. She'd found him in the conference room, surrounded by printouts of code, screaming at his manager about "systemic incompetence" and how "people die because of this kind of sloppiness," seemingly unable to recognize that he himself was the problem. Security had walked him out. The company had been generous, calling it a medical leave rather than a termination, but the outcome was the same.

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He'd thrown himself into freelance work after that, taking on increasingly complex projects with impossible deadlines. She'd wake at three AM to find him still at his desk, energy drink cans scattered around him, muttering about edge cases and error handling. The bags under his eyes grew darker, his temper shorter.

"I can't watch you do this to yourself," he'd said one night, after finding her analyzing Li-mei's medical records for the hundredth time. "She's gone, Sarah. Not missing. Not transformed. Gone. And I need you here, in the real world, not chasing shadows."

The irony of him accusing her of losing grip while he was burning through savings and alienating every professional contact he had wasn't lost on her. But she'd understood the real message beneath his words: they were grieving in incompatible ways, their paths diverging more with each day.

The final straw came during a parent-teacher conference at Li-mei's old school. They'd gone to discuss donating her books to the library. Something about the cheerful classroom art had set David off. He'd started shouting about safety protocols and emergency response times, demanding to see their medical action plans. When the headmaster had tried to calm him down, David had grabbed him by his tie.

Sarah had managed to get David out before security arrived, but the damage was done. That night, she'd finally said what they'd both been thinking: "We can't keep doing this."

David had moved out three months ago, taking only his clothes and personal items. "I'll have someone pack up the rest," he'd said. But no one ever came. His books still lined their shelves, his running shoes still sat by the door, his coffee mug still waited by the sink. The things he'd left behind felt like accusations.

Sarah picked up her pen, then set it down again. Through the kitchen window, she could see the playground where Li-mei used to play. David had been the one to teach her to pump her legs on the swing, his software engineer's mind breaking down the physics into simple instructions their three-year-old could follow. Sarah had watched them from this same window, David's patient voice carrying across the grass: "Back and forth, just like this. See how it works?"

Last week, she'd spotted him walking past that same playground, looking thinner, his clothes wrinkled. He'd been carrying his laptop bag, probably heading to another client meeting. She'd heard through mutual friends that he was living in a small flat near the tech park, taking on more projects than any one developer could handle, still trying to maintain the lifestyle they'd had before. Still trying to solve grief like it was a coding problem.

The sun was setting by the time Sarah signed the papers. Her signature looked small next to David's, almost apologetic. She slipped them into the pre-addressed envelope, then walked to the mailbox on the corner. It was a clear evening, the kind they used to spend as a family in the garden, David grilling while Li-mei chased insects and Sarah read on the patio.

Her phone buzzed. A text from David: "Got notification of delivery confirmation. Thank you." Then, a moment later: "Tell the university's security team they can back off. I'm not going to cause any more scenes at your office."

She started to type "I'm sorry," but deleted it. Instead, she wrote: "Take care of yourself." It was inadequate, but at least it was honest. They had walked through the darkest moment of their lives together, only to find themselves emerging into different worlds - she into her academic obsession with documented absences, he into a spiral of anger and self-destruction.

Sarah made herself tea in the fancy coffee maker, a small act of rebellion. Tomorrow she would return to her research, to her walls of red string and her carefully documented absences. But tonight she sat in her kitchen, surrounded by the artifacts of her old life, and allowed herself to feel the weight of this new separation - not a sudden severing, but the final acknowledgment of a distance that had been growing for years.

Outside, the lights of Cambridge glowed steady and familiar. Somewhere in the city, she knew, David was probably hunched over his laptop, taking on another impossible project, trying to maintain control over something, anything. They were both looking for answers, just in completely different directions. Inside her too-quiet apartment, Sarah Chen held a cooling cup of tea and wondered which of them had truly lost their grip on reality.