He said it was a fake divorce, but I left.

On the night of her fiftieth birthday, after years of a marriage that had become a formality, Sarah's husband Michael comes to her bed. She takes it as a gift, until he asks for a divorce and offers her all the assets. Five years earlier he had asked the same, calling it a fake divorce to shield the family from gambling debts; they divorced, stayed under one roof, and remarried. Then she overheard his friends speak of another woman.

Now that woman is back, with a child. Michael buys the boy clothes and a hundred-dollar cake, and Sarah schedules the divorce herself. At city hall she tells the clerk she has cancer and does not want to burden him. He promises to return in thirty days. The day after he leaves, men with bats come to the recycling yard demanding his debts, and she is beaten.

She flies south to her friend Brenda, who cheers that she should have left him long ago.