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Rebecca did everything that didn't require bureaucracy first.
She started with her business cards, then gathered the monogrammed towels, the suitcases, the robes and had it all unstitched. She ordered a stamp with an RW seal, and stationary with her new-old name. She made a fresh email and switched all social media usernames, even though she barely used them, and changed the passwords too, because he'd known her pattern.
There was a paper weight she’d gotten from an unimportant acquaintance for Christmas a long time ago, a golden R and M screwed to a heavy stone base. Rebecca quite liked it, so she'd bought a screwdriver, loosened the M, turned it upside down then tightened it back in. The font looked better that way, and if she was the type to take in life through metaphors then, that would not have been a bad one.
When the decree absolute arrived, the final document declaring her divorced, it was mailed to her solicitor's office and he’d offered to take the necessary papers to get the name change underway. She’d refused. There was a lush envelope made of thick paper, the kind you'd use for invitations usually, containing her birth and marriage certificates and a signed statement declaring she'd be switching back to her birth name for all intents and purposes that she was eager to hand in herself. She'd sealed it with wax and pressed it shut with her new stamp and proper initials.
Once the official change was sorted, she'd updated her driver's license, her passport, her property deeds and bank statements. And, because she was already in the middle of handling papers, she added Nora to her will. Each time she signed Rebecca Welton felt like resistance. She appreciated the tangible severance.
Still, there was no way to escape the people, the Mrs. Mannions, the fact that she’d disappeared from everyone who'd known her before it. She handled it poorly for a while, at the beginning, when it seemed impossible she would be her own again.
It lasted until the spring, when she was out shopping and spotted someone she used to know at Uni. She couldn’t remember the name but she remembered a shrill echoing across the lecture hall that always made her roll her eyes. Rebecca hadn’t felt inclined to reconnect. She was turning away to leave the shop when, in that previously dreaded voice, came a gift.
“Rebecca Welton? Is that you?”
It is, she remembers thinking, It is.
Rebecca is mulling all that over now, watching Ted’s back while he works, at their house, where they live, where he cooks her dinner almost every other night. Today is carbonara. He’s never known her by any other name.
It would be mad to have to do it again.
“Ted, will you marry me?”
He is dumping pasta into the strainer and lets the pot clatter to the ground, spaghetti slinking over the edge of the sink and down the cabinets.
It would be mad to have to do it again.
But she won’t have to.