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‘Burn a Bridge with Subtracting Action’

“Je déteste le math.”
Funny, really, since Marta was a charter accountant. Numbers were her life’s work here in Province, France. It was the country her company had sent her to for supposed business purposes, but she was aware of the real truth. They’d sent her here to get over him, that cheating pile of s**t she’d once called a husband, the man she’d sworn to be with until death claimed one or both of them. And yet here she was so far from home without a life to go back to when she finally felt alright enough to return.
“I could always call my mother I suppose; ask about moving in with her until I’m back on my feet and ready to move on with my life.”
Not the most creative plan she could have come up with, but then again, between her lazy attitude and lack of creativity, it was very nearly the best of her ability to come up with something so bland. It had been these coupled with her lack of interest in the physical side of their relationship that had sent William, her then husband, right into the arms of his perky blonde assistant as she knew full well. And now here she was, in the middle of a divorce sure to turn nasty, working in a career that she hated with all her might in a country where they spoke a language that she had only managed to learn enough of to effectively ask where the nearest bar was. After all, she’d recently taken up drinking, the only thing that seemed to dim her awareness, her observant nature, if only for a while. Then again, she hadn’t been able to observe the deterioration of her own marriage until the day he marched out the open front door carrying a suitcase under one arm and her heart under the other. Nothing ever lasted long though in Marta’s world, her marriage was proof enough of that. And yet, somewhere deep inside of herself, she knew she didn’t really mind that fact much at all.
“This just isn’t working out the way I planned it to.” Marta sighed running her fingers through her hair, lazily glancing up at the computer screen before her eyes.
The strings of numbers reminded her of wasted time. She felt she must have been sloshed her entire marriage to have missed noticing just how damaged it was there at the end. Then again, she’d always felt the distance between them from the start, even if she had chosen to ignore it. But who could ignore the stretch of miles between Europe and her old life on pause back in South Dakota? Marta just didn’t care to find out for herself, too aware that she would find an answer to want to try and move forward down a path whose bridge she’d already thrown countless matches onto not really caring whether or not it burned or resisted. Too bland to come up with another means of destruction, too lazy to mind the destruction very much at all, she stood and watched the blaze as though she’d had no part in it. She was like the arsonist with amnesia, forgetting that she’d set the fires she was watching destroy her life from the inside out.
She’d known it was coming, just as she knew that night when she heard the rapping at her hotel room door. Marta knew there was only one person who could be standing on the other side, possibly holding flowers to go along with his apology but definitely minus that one ever crucial problem of the assistant who had cost him Marta, his wife, in the first place sending her from her marriage and so far from home.
When William left France, Marta went with him.
All this time – substitute an affair for the marriage, minus Marta, add the assistant, divide up the marriage, multiply by the miles between them, subtract the bitterness at the last second, add in his apologies – and still the numbers didn’t add up as they should.