August 17, Monday
JILL MATHERS was already seated when Deputy Wells brought me to the conference room, a legal pad balanced on her knee, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.
"Isabel. I'm glad you came back." She said it simply, without fanfare, but I felt something loosen slightly in my chest anyway.
"How are you doing?" she asked, once I'd settled into the armchair.
"Fine," I said, reflexively, the word arriving before I'd examined whether it was true.
"Is there anything about the trial that's causing you stress or sleepless nights?"
I shook my head. "I find it all fascinating."
"And your family? How are they doing?"
I hesitated. "Not so fine."
"How do you feel about that?"
I turned the question over, aware that Jill had a way of asking things that sounded simple, but weren't. "Guilty," I admitted.
"But not as guilty as I probably should.
" I picked at a loose thread on the arm of the chair.
"There's a part of me that doesn't entirely mind watching my ex-husband struggle to hold things together for once. Does that make me a terrible person?"
"No," Jill said. "It makes you someone who spent years absorbing the consequences of decisions you didn't make alone, and who's now watching someone else absorb a fraction of that for a change. That's not cruelty. That's exhausted honesty."
I exhaled slowly and relaxed.
"Would you like to talk about the marriage ending?" she asked.
"It's a cliché," I said, before I could stop myself. "He found someone younger. Prettier. Better, apparently, at whatever I was failing to be."
"It's rarely ever that simple," Jill said gently. "Even when it looks that way from the outside."
"Everyone seems to think it's my fault, though. That I wasn't… interesting enough. Wasn't enough, period."
"Who's everyone?"
The question caught me somewhere unguarded. "Warren, obviously. My neighbors—the ones who exchange looks they think I don't see. My daughter, who told me flat out that if I weren't so boring, he wouldn't have needed someone else." I paused. "And me. I think it, too, more than I'd like to admit."
"Can you say more about that?"
But it felt like a huge can of worms. "I don't really want to get into it today."
Jill didn't push. She simply nodded and made a small note.
"That's all right," she said eventually.
"I have a suggestion, if you're open to it.
Between now and our next session, I'd like you to write your biography.
Not a formal résumé—just your story, in your own words.
Who you were before you met your ex-husband.
Who you were during your marriage. Who you think you are now.
There's no length requirement, no right way to do it.
We can go over it together next time, if you'd like. "
"I don't know if I'll have much to say."
"You might be surprised." She capped her pen. "Or you might not write a single word, and that's all right too. It's an invitation, not an assignment."
I nodded, noncommittal, unwilling to promise something I wasn't sure I could deliver.
But walking back down the hallway afterward, past Deputy Wells's steady, unreadable presence, I found myself already turning over the idea in my head.
The person I'd been before Warren was a version of myself so far in the past she felt almost fictional.
To find her I'd have to go looking in mental rooms I hadn't opened in years.