CHAPTER 30 Maya
Maya
She didn't need a perfect life. She had spent her entire career working on buildings that weren't perfect—structures already standing, walls she couldn't move, load-bearing constraints she had to design around.
She had never once walked away from a building because it wasn't what she would have built from scratch. She had worked with what was there.
This was the same problem.
She opened the notebook and drew a line down the center of the page.
Perfect Life she wrote at the top of the left column. Then, on the right: Reality.
She started with her dream job. She thought about it. Being able to knock down all the walls and rebuild to whatever specs she wanted. Not having to worry about any of the constraints she worked around daily. She smiled. That job didn’t have a name since it didn’t exist.
Then she tapped her pen on the right side column. What was the realistic job for her. She had skills. She could coordinate. She could manage. She could read a set of plans and spot a problem before it became expensive. She could learn new things. She had done it before.
She could do work that mattered, even if it wasn't the work she'd imagined.
She wrote job and put a question mark.
She paused before writing the next one.
Baby with Reid. She wrote.
On the right side she wrote: Aunt. Then, beneath it: Godmother.
She looked at the right-hand column for a long moment.
Then she wrote: Mom.
She stared at it.
Her throat tightened.
She drew a box around it and colored the ink over it until it was completely obscured. That was too fragile to put on paper. It belonged to a future she couldn't imagine yet and somehow looking at it directly felt like pressing on a bruise.
It hurt.
Married. She wrote it with a sigh. Happily married to Reid Lawson who was crazy in love with her. That’s what she wanted. That’s what she had thought she had.
She was practical.
She could meet someone new. She could fall in love with someone else. She tried to imagine that but she couldn’t. Not now, not yet.
Next to reality she wrote: Single.
She had seen enough of life to know that single didn't mean diminished, that a life could be full and purposeful and real without a husband in it. She knew that in her bones.
She added “happily” to the single.
She wasn’t there yet but it was realistic, wasn’t it? That wasn’t too much to ask for.
Where would she live in her perfect life? That was easy. It was her home with Reid. Hers and Reid's. The kitchen where she'd made coffee a thousand mornings. The bedroom. The garden.
What was reality? Something small, something affordable. She could make a small space work. She was good at that.
Could she stay here? Staying here meant walking Owen home from work, going to Edith’s aqua aerobics classes. She wanted to meet Jenny’s baby. She wanted to go to the summer picnic on the sports field.
Or she could pack up and leave. She’d lived that way for her entire childhood.
She wrote: Rental
She wrote: Location tbd
She sat with the notebook in her lap and looked at nothing in particular, and let herself see the distance between the two columns. The gap between what she had planned and what she was building instead.