Chapter 5
Freya answers my phone the way she runs a code blue — with absolute authority and zero hesitation.
“Marie Carmichael’s phone, this is Freya.
She’s not available.” A pause. The caller talks.
Freya’s face doesn’t change. “No. I understand what you’re offering and the answer is no.
She has her own legal counsel. If Mr. Carmichael’s attorneys need to reach her attorneys, they can do that through the proper channels.
This number is not a proper channel. Goodbye. ”
She hangs up. She puts my phone back on the kitchen counter and picks up her coffee and takes a sip like she just swatted a mosquito instead of a partner at what I’m guessing is a very expensive law firm.
“Who was that?” I ask from the couch, where I’m doing the ankle exercises Darren assigned me. Flex, point, circle. Flex, point, circle. The repetition is soothing in a way that actual rest is not.
“Kellan’s legal team. They want to discuss a ‘joint statement regarding the incident.’ Their words.”
“A joint statement.”
“Apparently his lawyers and his PR people have decided that a unified public narrative would be beneficial for both parties.” She makes air quotes around beneficial for both parties with one hand while holding her coffee with the other. “I told them to route it through your lawyer.”
“I don’t have a lawyer.”
“You do now. I called Simone from my gym. She does family law. She’s terrifying.”
I look at Freya. She’s cross-legged on the floor in front of my coffee table, surrounded by a scatter of takeout containers and a legal pad covered in her handwriting — names, phone numbers, a timeline of Kellan’s contact attempts that she’s been tracking with the precision of a case study.
She’s wearing scrubs from a shift she pulled this morning.
She flew back to New York, went straight to the ER, worked twelve hours, and came here to eat pad thai and manage my life.
She does this three or four times a week.
She has not asked for anything in return except that I eat and do my exercises and not answer the door.
“Freya,” I say.
“What.”
“Thank you.”
She looks up. For a second her face does something I rarely see from her — it softens.
The sharp edges ease and the armor drops and she’s just my friend, the woman I met in nursing school when we were both twenty and scared and pretending not to be, the woman who held my hand during my first code and told me afterward, over bad cafeteria coffee: you did good, don’t let them see you shake.
“Don’t thank me,” she says. “I’m enjoying this. I haven’t had a nemesis since Dr. Kaplan in the ICU.”
“Kellan is not your nemesis.”
“Kellan is a six-foot-two problem I have been waiting five years to solve.” She picks up a piece of pad thai with her chopsticks. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
She’s not wrong. And we both know it.
The truth about Freya and my marriage is that she saw it before I did.
Not the crash — nobody could have predicted that.
But the erosion. The slow, invisible way that Kellan’s world expanded and mine contracted until the imbalance was structural, load-bearing, built into the foundation of how we lived.
Freya saw it the way she sees everything: directly, without the comforting filters that most people use to make difficult truths bearable.
She saw it at my wedding. She stood next to me in a bridesmaid’s dress she hated — sage green, she said she looked like a mint — and she held my bouquet and she told me she loved me and she was happy for me and she was watching him.
I laughed. I thought she was being protective, the way she always was, the friend who vetted my dates and interrogated my boyfriends and once told a man in a bar that if he made me cry she would find him and he would not enjoy it.
But she wasn’t just being protective. She was being accurate.
“I remember the first time you skipped a shift,” she tells me now.
We’re on our third night of this routine — takeout, the couch, the legal pad, the ongoing cataloging of Kellan’s attempts to breach the perimeter.
“You called in because Kellan had a thing. A dinner. Something with a client. And you called in, Marie. You never called in. You came to work with the flu once. You came to work with food poisoning. I personally watched you run a code with a fever of a hundred and two. And then you married this man and suddenly you were calling in for a dinner party.”
“It wasn’t just a dinner party.”
“No, I know. It was an important dinner party. They were all important. That was the trick — his world made everything feel important, and your world, the ER, the work that actually saved actual lives, became the thing that was flexible.” She puts down her chopsticks.
“You stopped being Marie and you became Mrs. Carmichael, and the worst part is you did it willingly because you loved him, and I watched it happen and I didn’t say anything because I thought it was your choice and I should respect it. ”
“It was my choice.”
“Choices made inside a gravitational field aren’t free choices, Marie. You didn’t decide to give up nursing. You just got pulled so far into his orbit that nursing looked small from where you were standing.”
I don’t answer. She’s right and I know she’s right and the knowing sits in my chest like one of the cracked ribs — tender to the touch, painful when I breathe too deeply around it.
“I’m not saying this to make you feel bad,” she says.
Her voice is quieter now. The sharpness is still there but there’s something underneath — the grief she carries for the friend she watched disappear.
“I’m saying it because he’s going to try to get you back.
He’s already trying. And when he comes — not with lawyers or flowers or letters, but with himself, with the version of him that’s real and sorry and devastated — you need to know what you’re going back to.
Not just a man. A world. A gravity. And the last time you lived in that gravity, you lost yourself. ”
I flex my ankle. Point. Circle.
“I know,” I say.
The reports about Kellan come in through various channels — Heath, who Freya runs into at a coffee shop and interrogates with professional thoroughness; the doorman, who tells Freya that Mr. Carmichael sat in a parked car outside the building for two hours last Tuesday; and the internet, which Freya monitors the way an epidemiologist monitors a disease outbreak.
“He fired his head of PR,” she tells me one evening, scrolling through something on her phone. “It’s on the aviation industry news sites. Graham Whitfield, the guy who’s been doing Carmichael Aviation’s communications for six years. Kellan fired him.”
“Why?”
“The article doesn’t say. But Heath told me.
” She puts her phone face-down on the table.
“Whitfield suggested that the crash narrative could be managed. That there was a version of the story where Kellan comes out looking decisive and heroic — the CEO who got his team to safety, who mounted a search, who did everything he could. A narrative where you were the unfortunate casualty of an impossible situation, not the wife who was left behind.”
I sit very still. The words land and settle.
“Kellan fired him on the spot. In front of the entire communications team. Said if anyone else in the building tried to spin what happened to his wife into a PR asset, they’d be next.”
I don’t know what to do with this. It doesn’t fit the shape I’ve been building — the shape of a man who triages, who calculates, who sees every situation as a problem to be optimized.
Firing your head of PR for trying to manage a crisis is the opposite of triage.
It’s the opposite of calculation. It’s the blind, stupid, destructive act of a man who heard someone try to reduce his wife to a talking point and couldn’t stomach it.
“That doesn’t change anything,” I say.
“I know.”
“He still left.”
“I know.”
“Firing a PR guy doesn’t undo twelve hours on a mountain.”
“I know, Marie. I’m not building his case. I’m giving you information.” She picks her phone back up. “Do with it what you want.”
I do nothing with it. I put it in the same place I put everything Kellan-related: the mental drawer next to the physical one, the growing collection of things I am not ready to look at.
But the information keeps coming. Heath, apparently, talks to Freya with a candor that surprises me — he’s Kellan’s brother, blood loyalty should put them on the same side, but Heath has always been the Carmichael who doesn’t play the game the way the family expects.
He calls Freya. She takes the calls because intelligence is intelligence, and Freya respects useful data regardless of the source.
“Heath says Kellan told him something,” Freya says the next evening. She’s careful with the delivery — casual, offhand, like she’s mentioning the weather. “About the mountain. About the search.”
“What.”
“That when he’s alone, at night — in the office, the penthouse, wherever — he hears you.
Tapping. The sound of your hand on the metal, that rhythm you described.
He hears it. And he wakes up reaching for you and you’re not there and he can’t—” She stops.
Presses her lips together. “He can’t make it stop. ”
The room is quiet. The coffee machine hums in the kitchen. Outside, a car horn. A distant siren, the sound I used to chase.
“I don’t care,” I say.
“I know you don’t.”
“I don’t care that he’s haunted. I was the one under the metal. He was the one who walked away. If the sound follows him, good. It should.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t bring me his nightmares like they’re evidence of something. His bad sleep doesn’t undo my twelve hours.”
“I said okay, Marie.” Her voice is soft. Not retreating — absorbing. The way she’d absorb a patient’s anger in the ER, letting it land without flinching, holding the space. “I won’t bring it up again.”