CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The tea had gone cold again.
She got up, carried the mug to the kitchen, and poured it down the sink. She put the kettle on again, not yet sure when she would be calling it a night.
This was how most of her evenings played out these days.
She’d make tea and forget about it, create fairly nice dinners for herself and eat only a bite or two.
She’d have the television on for company rather than content just so she wouldn’t feel completely alone.
The small, repetitive rituals that filled the hours between dinner and sleep with just enough structure to keep the night from feeling completely unoccupied.
She had read somewhere, in the early months after Richard left, that routine was the scaffolding that held a person together during upheaval.
She had believed it then, as cheesy as it sounded.
Eighteen months later she understood that scaffolding was meant to be temporary, simply built around something that needed to be overhauled or repaired.
At some point the structure was supposed to come down because the work underneath it was finished.
But nobody had told her what to do if the work never started.
The kettle began to murmur on the burner. She stood at the counter and watched it, trying not to feel trapped. Trying not to feel defeated.
She had tried. God, how she had tried!
That was the thing she returned to most often, especially in the evenings when the apartment was quiet and there was nothing to distract her from her own honest accounting of things.
She had genuinely, earnestly tried. She had found Fresh Horizons through a friend of a friend, a woman named Leia who had spoken about it as if it had changed her life.
And as far as Ruth knew, even to this day, maybe it had.
Leia had been very persuasive, and Ruth had gone to the orientation with real hope.
She had sat in a circle of folding chairs in a beige meeting room and listened to Richard Hale describe the program in warm, measured language, talking about transformation and community.
There had been two female therapists there, too, and they had spoken about the particular resilience of women who had been through the end of a marriage and come out the other side.
She had filled out the intake questionnaire with more honesty than she had ever brought to any document in her life.
She had answered every question fully, had not flinched away from any of it: the insomnia, the meals she stopped cooking, the way she sometimes sat in her car in the parking garage at work for ten minutes before she could bring herself to go inside.
She had described Richard's leaving in plain, factual language that had cost her something to write. She’d cried while writing it down and that had been the moment she was sure Fresh Horizons was exactly what she needed.
Because didn’t she deserve some answers?
Some happiness? She’d been married for nineteen years, and there had been no warning when the end had come.
There had been conversation on a Tuesday evening in March that had lasted forty minutes, and it had resulted in the end of her marriage.
She had written it all down because Hale had asked her to and because she had believed, sitting in that beige room under those flat lights, that her honesty was the beginning of healing it.
And for a while, she’d felt that she’d been right.
The kettle whistled, pulling her out of her thoughts. She poured the water over the bag and carried the fresh mug back to the couch.
The Fresh Horizons forum was open on her laptop on the coffee table. The screen was still lit from when she had checked it twenty minutes ago. She sat back down and pulled it toward her.
The program had not worked... not for her.
She had completed every component, attended every session, and read every piece of supplementary material they had offered.
She had done the workbook exercises with the same painful earnestness she had brought to the questionnaire.
She had sat in the group sessions and listened to other women describe their progress and had nodded along.
She had encouraged others, she had gone out to coffee with some of the women and done her best to maintain that community.
She had gone on four dates in the eight months following completion, all of them arranged through the app the program recommended.
The first man had spent most of the time over dinner talking about his pension.
The second had seemed genuinely kind until he found out he wasn’t getting laid on a first date and then called her every name in the book.
The third had ended the evening by telling her she reminded him of his mother, which he had seemed to intend as a compliment. The fourth had simply not shown up.
And all the while, she had watched the forum. She had read it several times a day while also pursuing the private Facebook account. She stayed present and kept trying to learn. But it had simply not worked.
She had joined the community because it was presented as an extension of the support, a place to maintain the connections formed in the program and to continue the work.
What it had turned into, for her, was a window she couldn't stop looking through. She’d seen post after post from women celebrating milestones.
First dates and second dates—new relationships and promotions, solo vacations and pottery classes.
The language was always the same: warmly exclamatory, studded with hearts and affirmations.
We love this for you. You deserve every good thing.
Look at you go. #lifegoals or some other stupid shit.
She had watched it for eighteen months. She had never once posted anything of her own, because there had been nothing to post. No date worth mentioning.
No small victory to offer up to the group for its approval.
Nothing that would earn the chorus of hearts and you go girl and this is your season.
She had refreshed the page and read the updates until, at some point, she had started to be overwhelmed by anger and injustice.
The Fresh Horizons program had promised transformation, but it had delivered nothing except a front-row seat to everyone else's.
And here she was now, having come to the most pivotal moments of her life as she tried to understand what she had become.
It was tricky because she did not think of what she had done as killing.
That word belonged to a different category of action, something impulsive and brutal and without logic. It was for maniacs and psychopaths.
What she had done was closer to the opposite of that.
It had been deliberate, and measured. She had decided to take these actions through a process of reasoning that had taken months.
She had sat with the forum and watched the celebrating women and understood, gradually and then with complete clarity, that fairness was not a system that operated on its own.
It required administration. Someone had to keep the accounts.
Someone had to keep the world in balance
Carol Paige had been the first. Carol, who had called out CoachSteve in the forum with the confident authority of a woman who had found her footing and wanted everyone to know it.
The group had become precious to her, and CoachSteve had been an interloper.
Carol, who posted about her date with the easy brightness of someone who had never once sat in a parking garage trying to remember how to walk into a building.
Ruth had read Carol's post about Paul, about how he had listened and asked follow-up questions and walked her to her car.
She had read it three times, fuming. She had known Carol's address from the intake directory that Hale's program kept. That sort of information wasn’t exactly advertised, but it was indeed accessible to anyone patient enough to learn a few coding tricks and knew the nooks and crannies of a public website.
And she hadtaught herself the language of coding over time, through online courses and with some AI help. And it had been for this very purpose.
That had been Hale's real gift to her, she supposed. Not the workbook exercises or the group sessions or the cheerful supplementary materials. The intake form. Eight pages of personal information, answered with the full honesty the program encouraged. They were loaded down with vital tidbits such as home addresses, neighborhoods, daily schedules, personal circumstances, and so much more. Cross-referenced with the forum profiles and the linked Facebook accounts that most members had attached to their registrations, the information was complete and remarkable. Hale had built a community around radical openness. Ruth found it darkly ironic that it was also what was causing these women’s lives to end.
She scrolled through the forum now, moving past the usual evening activity.
A woman named Susan had posted an update about her garden.
Someone called WandaLemon had announced a promotion at work on the same day she’d secured a second date with a man she met three weeks ago.
Ruth moved past all of it with the automatic efficiency of someone sorting mail.
She came to a sudden stop when she saw a new post near the top of the feed.
It was a post from Diane Marsh. Ruth recognized the name and couldn’t help but sneer at the screen.
Diane had been posting steadily for the past few months, and her posts were the almost template example of incremental updates of a woman who was finding her stride.
Tonight's post was brief and bright: Second date tonight and I have to say, I think I might actually be letting myself be hopeful again.
Is that terrifying? Absolutely. Worth it? Ask me in a week!
Fourteen people had already liked it. Three comments had been dropped in the first few minutes, all variations on the same theme. You deserve this. So happy for you!
Ruth read the post once. Then she opened a second tab and navigated to the program's member directory, which was accessible through the forum's settings panel to anyone with a registered account.
The directory was not prominently advertised.
It was several layers in, behind a drop-down that most members never explored because they had no reason to.
But it was there, and it was populated with whatever each member had entered at intake.
Diane Marsh had filled out her profile with the same good faith honesty the program encouraged.
It was all there: her zip code, her neighborhood, the cross-street she had listed as a reference point in the section asking members to describe their living situation.
From the zip code and the cross-street and the neighborhood name, an address was not difficult to arrive at. It had never been difficult. Ruth had done these enough times now that the process felt almost administrative, like looking up a reference in an index.
She opened the notes app on her phone and typed the address. She read it back against what she had found in the directory and confirmed it.
Then she closed the tab, picked up her tea, and found that this cup was still warm.