Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
DELANEY
The paint looks right at eight in the morning.
I know it's right before I've fully processed why — the light comes through the east window exactly the way Ethan said it would, and the sample I taped to the wall last week is doing exactly what it should do, which is sit there in the morning like it belongs.
Not orange. Not cold. Just the right temperature of itself.
Right call, I think, in his voice, and then feel slightly ridiculous about thinking in his voice and then make my coffee and get on with the morning.
The call from Patricia comes at nine-thirty on a Monday in the first week of December.
I'm at the kitchen table with the Millhaven Arts Center project — a small rebrand for their winter season program, referred by Lila, my third local client after Beck and Mags — and I'm in the middle of a brand voice document when Patricia's name appears on my screen and I feel the thing I've come to associate with Patricia's calls: something is happening.
She doesn't call for small things. She emails small things.
She calls when the thing requires a voice.
I both appreciate this about her and dread it.
"Delaney," she says. "Do you have a few minutes?"
I close my laptop. "Yes."
"Jason's lawyer has made a proposal. I want to walk you through it." She pauses. "I'll say upfront: it's not his best offer and I think we can do better. But I want you to hear the full picture before we discuss next steps."
She walks me through it.
I have a pad I keep specifically for Patricia calls it.
It lives under the kitchen table so I can grab it fast, which tells you something about how much real estate she occupies in my daily infrastructure.
I take notes. I ask clarifying questions.
I say mm and I see at appropriate intervals and keep my voice at the level that means I'm fine, I'm a professional, this is just information.
This is a skill I developed in October and have been refining ever since.
By the end of the call, I have a clear picture of where we are, which is: closer to done than last month, but not as close as we’d thought.
"He's positioning for leverage before the final negotiation," Patricia says. "This is standard. I've seen it a hundred times. It doesn't change our position."
"How long?” I ask.
"Another sixty to ninety days, most likely. February is still possible. March is more realistic."
March. I write March on my notepad and look at it.
"We're going to get you what you're entitled to," Patricia says. "I need you to trust the process."
"I trust you. I’ll talk to Dana."
"Good. Call me Thursday."
She hangs up.
I sit at the kitchen table.
I look at the word March on the notepad.
Then I look at the garden — the espalier wires I strung along the south wall last week, the pear tree in its new shape, the pruned rosebushes — all of it sitting there being patient and organized and exactly as I left it.
The garden doesn't care about the timeline.
The garden will do what the garden does in March regardless of what Jason's lawyer filed in November.
The garden, I think, is better at this than I am.
March.
Not February. March, maybe. Ninety more days of formal proceedings and Patricia's calls and Jason's lawyer making proposals that aren't his best offer and the word strategic being applied to the dismantling of eight years of a shared life.
The thing about Jason using leverage strategy is that it tracks perfectly.
Of course he's doing that. Of course, his lawyer is the kind of person who plays this game and his client is the kind of person who lets him.
This is not news. This is Jason being exactly who he has always been, which is the thing I've been slowly understanding since October.
I just hadn't expected it to still land.
I've been holding February in my chest since Dana said it on the back porch in November — specifically, like a date circled on a calendar, the kind that marks the end of something and the start of something else. Now the circle has smudged, and there is a grief in that which I did not expect.
Not grief for the marriage. Grief for the timeline. Grief for the version of myself I had already started becoming in February.
I sit with it for a minute.
Then I put on my coat and go for my walk.
The walk doesn't help the way it usually does.
This is annoying. I've been counting on my walks.
I've been deploying them strategically — morning walk to start the day, afternoon walk when a project goes sideways, post-Patricia-call walk to decompress — and they've been working, and today the December air is doing its clarifying thing and my legs are moving and none of it is touching the March problem.
What I'm thinking is: I thought I'd be done.
Not done-done, not over it, not fully healed and launched into the clean version of my new life.
But done with the formal part. Done with the legal architecture of the thing.
I'm closer to done than I was in October — Patricia said it, Dana has said it every week — but the sixty-to-ninety days feels like a distance I didn't account for, and somewhere in the not-accounting I'd let myself start believing February.
I'd let myself start believing what comes after February.
I stop at the corner of Elm Lane and Main and look at Bellamy's across the street.
Through the window I can see Mags behind the counter, the morning regulars in their usual places, everyone doing the Tuesday thing with no idea that I'm standing on the corner in December in the grip of a feeling I can't quite name.
Which is fine. Which is how it should be.
It's not their problem that my attorney called with news I should have been prepared for.
I am, I note, not prepared for it.
He's positioning for leverage, Patricia said.
Jason in a lawyer's office somewhere in Raleigh, making strategic decisions about the dissolution of our marriage.
Which is exactly what I'd expect from the man who invented agreements that didn't exist and held me to them.
Of course he's doing leverage. Granted, his timeline is a strategy.
He's been running the narrative of our relationship since before I knew there was a narrative to run, and now he's doing it with a lawyer instead of a managing voice, and the main difference is that Patricia is better at this than he is and it's going to cost him.
I know this.
I also know that knowing it doesn't make March feel like anything other than sixty additional days of him existing as a procedural fact in my life.
I go to Bellamy's.
Mags takes one look at me and says nothing, which is the version of Mags I only see when she's decided words would be the wrong tool. She makes me a mocha and puts it in front of me and goes back to the counter.
I sit at the window table with both hands wrapped around the cup and I breathe.
After a few minutes she comes back and sits across from me with her own coffee and says: "Talk or don't. Either is fine."
"Patricia called," I say.
"Ah." She nods. Drinks her coffee.
"It's fine. The process is working. It's just going to be March instead of February."
"Mm."
"I know March is fine. I know it doesn't change anything practically."
"But," Mags says.
I look at the window. "I'd built February into how I was thinking about things." I pause. "Not consciously. Just — there was this picture I had, and February was in it, and now February is out of it, and the picture has to be different."
"What picture?"
I think about how to say it honestly. "The future I can see from here," I say.
"I've been making one. Bit by bit. The business, the cottage, the — all of it.
And February was a date in it, a kind of marker, like after that date the past is formally over.
And now it's March, or maybe March, and the past gets to take up space for longer. "
Mags looks at me. "Does it? Take up space?"
"Yes. Not the way it did in October. Not grief, exactly. More like a room in the house that you've packed up and are ready to close off, but the movers haven't come for the boxes yet."
Mags nods.
"I'm being dramatic," I say.
"You're being honest. There's a difference." She looks at her coffee. "Elise used to say that the thing you're waiting to be finished with is always the thing that finishes on its own schedule, not yours."
"That's frustrating."
"She found it clarifying." Mags lifts an eyebrow. "She was more Zen than me. I find it irritating. But she wasn't wrong."
I almost smile. "Did she say anything that wasn't right?"
"She thought the library's book return system was perfectly adequate," Mags says. "She was wrong about that."
I do smile, then. Fully.
Mags sees it and looks satisfied. "Go home. Work on something that's yours. That's what helps."
I go home. I work on the Arts Center brief, which is interesting and mine, and by noon I'm doing better.
Not fine. Functional. There's a difference — functional means I can write a sentence about brand voice without pausing to contemplate the phrase brand voice for three minutes while thinking about how my ex-husband had a brand voice and it was called the managing one.
Functional is good. I'll take functional.
At two o'clock I go outside to look at the espalier wires.
Yes, again. I know. They're fine. They were fine this morning and they're fine now and they'll be fine tomorrow, which is apparently something I need to confirm in person on an irregular schedule, because I am the kind of person who strung wires before I was allowed and then checked them every day.
Mags would say this is character strength.
Dana would say I've transferred my anxious energy into structural elements.
They're both right. The wires don't mind.
I'm crouching at the base of the wall, checking an anchor, when I hear the gate.
"Hey," Ethan says.