Chapter 7 Thirty Days
The exit plan starts the next morning.
I wake up before Blake. I lie in bed and listen to him breathe and I think about Raina's notepad. Week one: documents and irreplaceable items. Week two: finances. Week three: personal belongings. Week four: the rest.
Four weeks. Thirty days, give or take. That's how long it takes to dismantle a six-year relationship when you're doing it in secret.
Blake's alarm goes off at six. He reaches across me to hit snooze. His arm brushes my shoulder and he mumbles something into the pillow. Five minutes later the alarm goes off again and he groans and sits up and rubs his face and swings his legs out of bed.
"Morning," he says.
"Morning."
He goes to the shower. I get up and stand in front of the closet and look at everything inside it.
My clothes and his clothes and a few things we've both worn so many times that ownership is blurred.
On the top shelf there's a box of photos from our first years together.
Birthdays and holidays and a trip to the coast for our third anniversary.
I reach up and touch the corner of the box and then pull my hand back.
Not yet. Not while he's ten feet away.
I start that afternoon. After my last client I leave the salon and drive to the apartment before Blake gets home from work.
I go straight to the bedroom closet and pull down the filing box where I keep my important documents.
Birth certificate. Social security card.
Car title. My copy of the lease agreement.
Tax paperwork from the last three years.
The deed to my grandmother's property in Vermont that my mother divided between Raina and me after Grandma died.
All of it goes into a folder, the folder goes into my bag, and I drive to Raina's.
"Good start," she says when I hand her the folder. She puts it in the guest room closet alongside the wine glasses and seasonal clothes she stores up there. Nobody would look twice at it.
"It feels weird," I say. "Taking my own stuff out of my own apartment. I keep feeling like I'm doing something wrong."
"You're not doing anything wrong. You're protecting yourself from someone who's already done wrong."
She's right. But the feeling doesn't go away. Every item I remove is another admission that what I have with Blake is ending. Not someday. Not hypothetically. Now. In real time. One folder at a time.
Over the next several days I move things gradually.
I take a rhythm to it. Every other day I stop at the apartment before Blake gets home and I take something.
The box of photos from the top shelf. My grandmother's necklace from my jewelry box.
The earrings my mother gave me for my twenty-first birthday.
A few books that are specifically mine. An old sweatshirt from high school that I keep for sentimental reasons.
My yearbook. A small ceramic bowl that my aunt painted for me years ago that has been sitting on the bathroom shelf so long I'm not sure Blake even sees it anymore.
Small things. Things he wouldn't notice even if he decided to take inventory of every surface in the apartment, which Blake would never do because Blake has never in his life paid close attention to the objects around him.
He sees the big picture. The TV. The couch.
The bed. He doesn't notice when a jewelry box gets lighter or when a shelf has one fewer item.
That blindness, which I used to find endearing in a messy, absent-minded kind of way, is now the thing that makes my exit possible.
I develop a system for deciding what to take and when.
I prioritize sentimental items first because those are the things I could never replace if something went wrong.
If Blake came home early one day and found me packing, if the plan fell apart, if everything went sideways, at least the things that matter most would already be safe at Raina's.
Then practical things that belong solely to me.
Then the shared items I can claim without argument.
My hair tools. My styling products. The KitchenAid mixer that was a gift from my mother, not a shared purchase, even though Blake uses it occasionally for pancake batter.
The mixer goes to Raina's on a Wednesday while Blake is at a job in the next county over.
It fits in a grocery bag. Nobody would look twice at me carrying a grocery bag to my car.
The hardest part is the emotional weight of each trip.
Every item I pick up has a memory attached to it.
The photo box has pictures of Blake and me at a county fair two years ago where he won me a stuffed bear that I still keep on the dresser.
The yearbook has his handwriting inside the back cover from when he signed it during our senior year.
Even the ceramic bowl from my aunt sat next to Blake's deodorant on the bathroom shelf for two years and the two objects touching each other feels like a relationship in miniature.
Taking the bowl and leaving the deodorant means acknowledging that these two lives are being separated.
Each trip to Raina's adds to the growing pile in her guest room.
A stack of folders. A box of photos. A bag of jewelry and keepsakes.
My sister watches the pile grow and doesn't comment on it.
She doesn't need to. We both know what it represents.
Not just belongings being relocated. A life being taken apart piece by piece in the hours between shifts.
At the salon I maintain everything. Clients.
Cuts. Color. Small talk. Tips. Scheduling.
I am a machine that produces normalcy. I smile and I listen and my hands are steady and nobody sitting in my chair would guess that the woman cutting their hair goes home every night to a man she's planning to leave.
The work is actually helping. It gives me eight hours a day where I'm focused on something other than Blake and Hailey and the mess waiting for me at the end of each shift.
Cheryl knows something is wrong. She's known for weeks. One quiet afternoon between appointments she walks over to my station and stands there with her arms crossed.
"You know that offer I made? About being here if you need to talk?"
"I remember."
"It still stands. No pressure. No judgment. I've heard everything in this salon, Lara. Whatever it is, it won't shock me."
I look at her. Cheryl is fifty-two years old and she's been divorced twice and she's raised two kids on her own and she's worked in Pinehurst salons since she was nineteen.
She has heard every kind of story from every kind of person.
She probably suspects what mine is. In a town like this, when a young woman goes quiet and stops eating properly and starts checking her phone with a desperate frequency, the explanation is usually one of about three things. And Cheryl knows all three.
"Soon," I say. "I'll tell you soon."
"Whenever you're ready, hon."
The financial separation requires the most care.
I sit at Raina's kitchen table on a Sunday evening with my laptop open and my bank statements printed out.
The shared house fund account is in both our names.
We opened it together eighteen months ago with matching initial deposits of two hundred dollars each.
Since then I've put in four hundred every month without exception.
Blake has been short for the last five months by varying amounts.
Some months it was fifty dollars less. Some months it was two hundred less.
One month he put in nothing at all and claimed he forgot.
I add up every deposit. Mine total seven thousand four hundred dollars. Blake's total four thousand six hundred. The difference is twenty-eight hundred dollars. I've put in nearly three thousand more than he has.
"That money is yours," Raina says, looking over my shoulder at the spreadsheet.
"If I pull it all at once he'll notice immediately. The balance would drop by more than half."
"Has he ever logged into this account?"
"I honestly don't think he knows the password. I set it up. He just transfers money in on payday. Or doesn't."
"Then start moving it. A little at a time. Transfer your contributions into your personal account. If he ever checks the balance it'll look like it went down a normal amount, like fees or a monthly fluctuation."
I transfer eight hundred dollars the following Tuesday. I move it into my personal savings at a different bank. Blake doesn't notice. He doesn't check the account. He doesn't say a word about anything financial, which would be impressive if it weren't so pathetic.
I transfer another six hundred the next week.
Then another five hundred a few days later.
The balance in the shared account drops steadily but Blake is completely detached from it.
The irony is that his disinterest in our house fund is both the reason we're in this situation and the reason I'm able to get my money out without detection.
He doesn't check because he doesn't care about the house the way I do. He never did.
By the end of the second week I've secured most of my contributions. I leave enough in the account that the balance doesn't look alarming. About three thousand dollars. Most of it is Blake's money. Whatever he put in, he can keep.
During the third week something happens that I'm not expecting.
The friend group goes to a bar downtown on a Thursday night.
It's nothing fancy. A place called The Pint with sticky tables and decent wings and a pool table in the back that's slightly warped on the left side so every shot drifts if you don't compensate.
Everyone shows up. Blake and me. Ronnie and Nathan. Sierra. Chase. Alana. Hailey.