He’d met girls like her before. He just hadn’t known it till she handed him the divorce papers. She didn’t give a reason, just a phone number for another man’s house.
He remembered the woman he’d met, who taught him about woman like his ex wife. She had blue curls round her chin, an addiction to cherries and spoon through her hair in a similar fashion to Chinese women with chopsticks.
Everything about her had screamed fantastic.

The first thing she told him was that she’d been watching him itching to muddle his way over to her table for a while and was, honestly, surprised it had taken him that long.
Sometimes, when he’s home alone and down on life he sneaks over to that cafe and orders the soup of the day and an iced caramel with a cherry on top and a shot of expresso. She once told him those two things were the only reason she came to the cafe.
Charlotte was her name.

The second thing she told him was that she would be no good for him at all.
He told her he didn’t care.

Charlotte was wild. He wouldn’t hear from her for weeks, then suddenly she’d be sitting in the chair by his back door, holding a bottle of wine for him and singing songs softly with the tips of her breath. The third time she did this, he realized she was like a wild bird. Her feet wouldn’t let her be still. She came and went as she pleased.

A few months after he gave her a key to his backdoor, he found a letter on the chair next to it. Charlotte’s curling handwriting spilled through the pages. They told him of ever moment they’d had together. It ended with

My love, I know this will break your heart. I’m going away. By the time you read this I’ll be on a plane. I won’t say where. It will do you no good to wait for me. Find someone who’s nothing like me. Be happy.
Charlotte xx

He never did see her again.

He thought when he met his ex wife that she was nothing like Charlotte. She didn’t dye her hair. She always left a contact number and never brought wine or sat outside his backdoor. She had no interest in travel and hated soup.

When she handed him the divorce papers, he realized none of that was what Charlotte had meant. It was the wildness in her, the touch of something he could never quite understand in their gases. He still saw that glint in Charlotte’s eyes, deep within the only photograph he had allowed himself to keep, buried under years of tax returns.

The short, stabbing lines of his ex wife’s handwriting stained the back of the papers.
I’ve always known about the photo. I know you understand.