20. Rhodes
— ? —
Rhodes
The divorce papers arrived on a Tuesday.
I signed them alone, at my desk, while the San Francisco skyline went orange through the windows.
Maren had signed three weeks earlier, in Boston.
She hadn’t asked for anything, not the house, not the accounts we’d tangled together over eleven years.
She signed as Maren Bellamy, like Maren Calloway had never existed - she just wanted out. Clean, final, without me.
That was three years ago.
Rachel’s confession came too late to matter.
Six weeks after Maren left, she went public, a tearful apology and a statement to whatever outlet would run it.
She’d invented the affair, she said, because she’d convinced herself that if she removed Maren from the picture I’d finally see her.
I’d already fired her by then. The company put out its denial, and none of it brought my wife home.
The affair was never real. Everything else was.
I looked for her at first, harder than I had any right to.
I’d corner Nora at the shop and ask the only things that mattered, whether Maren was safe, whether she was happy.
Nora never broke. You’d prove you haven’t learned a damn thing, she told me once, and she was right.
It took me too long to stop, to understand that respecting Maren meant letting her keep the silence she’d chosen.
I never stopped showing up for Nora, though.
I still bring her coffee on Saturdays when I’m in California, still carry the buckets she shouldn’t be lifting and fix the back door she’s been meaning to get to for three years.
She asked me once why I kept coming. You were my family for eleven years too, I told her.
She handed me a broom and said the front walk wasn’t going to sweep itself.
It’s the closest thing to approval she’s ever given me.
The three years since haven’t been some graceful transformation.
I got worse before I got better, telling myself the longer hours and harder deals meant I was staying busy when I was really just trying to drown.
It took something close to an intervention to make me step back.
I stopped trying to control every decision and started sleeping more than four hours a night.
I even sat through some therapy, which helped about half as much as I’d hoped.
I’m not fixed.
I’m just aware now. Painfully, constantly, of what my old priorities cost me. Of who they cost me.
Which brings me to Boston.
The company is buying a historic property in the Back Bay, a former mansion turned event venue that’s been mismanaged into near-bankruptcy.
Beautiful bones, terrible bookkeeping. We’re bringing in new management, new vendors, a full rebrand.
It’s exactly the kind of project I’d have handled entirely by phone three years ago, sending an army of subordinates to deal with the in-person details.
Now I’m here myself, standing at the venue’s arched windows, watching the October light slant through glass that’s probably older than my grandfather.
The project manager asked if I wanted a coffee while we wait for the other vendors to arrive.
I said no. I’ve had three cups already. My hands aren’t steady.
There’s no reason for them not to be. This is a standard walkthrough. Caterer, florist, event coordinator. Just another Tuesday.
But Boston has been sitting wrong in my chest since I landed. The way the cold air tastes, maybe, or the fact that I’m standing in a city Maren always talked about visiting.
“Someday,” she’d said once, “I want to see the fall colors. The real ones. California autumn is just brown.”
I’d promised I’d take her. We’d do a long weekend, Freedom Trail, lobster rolls, all of it.
We never went.
The door opens behind me.
I hear the project manager’s voice first-“Oh great, you’re here, let me introduce you to-” and then footsteps, and then nothing.
The silence has a weight to it.
I turn around, and Maren Bellamy is standing in the doorway.
***
Maren
The morning starts the way every morning starts now: chaos.
“Rowan, we don’t put yogurt in our shoes.”
“But they’re hungry.”
“Shoes don’t eat.”
My son stares at me with his father’s eyes, that stubborn, assessing look that makes me feel like I’m the one being unreasonable, and says, very seriously, “These ones do.”
He’s three. Three and a half, technically, which he’ll remind anyone who forgets. He’s got Rhodes’s jawline already, Rhodes’s way of tilting his head when he’s thinking, and an unfortunate talent for charming his way out of every timeout I’ve ever attempted.
I love him so much it scares me.
“New rule,” I say, kneeling to rescue the sneakers. “Yogurt stays in bowls. Shoes stay on feet. We don’t combine these things.”
“What about socks?”
“Socks stay on feet too.”
“What if the socks are hungry?”
This is my life now. Negotiating breakfast logistics with a tiny human who has inherited every stubborn gene from both sides of his family tree and knows exactly how to weaponize his dimples.
I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
The drop-off at Little Sprouts Preschool takes seven minutes, Rowan’s current favorite teacher, Ms. Linda, is working the morning shift, which means he releases my hand and bolts toward the block corner without a backward glance.
I watch him through the window for a few seconds longer than I need to.
He’s already explaining something to another kid, hands moving in that emphatic way he has.
Just like his father.
I don’t think about that. I can’t think about that. So I don’t.
Bellamy Blooms Boston is a ten-minute walk from the preschool, which wasn’t an accident.
I designed my entire life around Rowan, the shop location, the apartment, the morning routine that lets me drop him off and pick him up every day.
My team knows the drill: emergency calls after 6 p.m. get routed to Jamie, my assistant manager. School plays are non-negotiable.
I built this. All of it, from nothing.
Well, not nothing. From the money I’d saved during my marriage, from the business plan I’d been developing for years, from Nora’s endless phone calls and my own refusal to fail. I landed in Boston eight months pregnant, terrified, and absolutely determined to prove I could do this alone.
And I did. I have.
The shop is small but beautiful, exposed brick, reclaimed wood counters, big windows that let in all that East Coast light Nora swore I’d hate.
We’re up to four employees now, all of them brilliant, all of them fiercely loyal to the business we’ve built together.
Jamie handles operations like she was born for it.
Diego has an eye for arrangements that rivals mine.
The twins, Camila and Sofia, run our delivery service with terrifying efficiency.
This is my life. My Boston. My everything that doesn’t include him.
Which is why the contract with Livingston House, the historic venue in Back Bay, felt like such a win.
It’s exactly the kind of anchor client that could take Bellamy Blooms Boston from “successful small business” to “institution.” Weekly events, corporate retreats, weddings every weekend from April through October.
The kind of steady work that means I can give everyone raises next year.
The deal was a footnote in the proposal documents. New ownership, new management, fresh money. I skimmed past it without registering the name.
That was stupid. That was colossally, unforgivably stupid.
But I’ve trained myself so well over three years not to think about anything connected to that name that my brain just, slid past it. Like water off glass.
I’m paying for that now.
The venue’s project manager meets me at the front entrance, all smiles and handshakes and “so excited to work with you.” Her name is Patricia, I think. Maybe Priscilla. I’m having trouble focusing because something feels wrong. The air tastes different. My chest is tight.
“The other stakeholders are already inside,” she’s saying as she leads me through the marble foyer. “Let me introduce you to-”
She pushes open the double doors to the main event hall, and there he is.
Rhodes.
Standing at the windows with his back to the room, silhouetted against the October light. I know that posture, those shoulders, the exact way he holds himself when he’s lost in thought, when his mind is somewhere else entirely.
He turns around.
The world stops.
Three years. Three years of building a life without him, of learning to fall asleep alone, of raising our son without ever saying your father out loud - of grief and fury and the slow, grinding work of becoming someone new.
And now he’s standing twenty feet away, looking at me like I’m a ghost.
His eyes drop to the portfolio under my arm. The Bellamy Blooms logo, hand-painted by Camila, is visible on the corner.
He gives a quiet, disbelieving laugh.
“Boston.”
The anger is instant and white-hot. It’s muscle memory at this point, see Rhodes, feel rage.
“Very good,” I say. My voice comes out sharp enough to cut glass. “The divorce didn’t damage your powers of observation.”
Something flickers across his face. Not hurt, exactly. More like acknowledgment. Like he expected exactly this much hostility and he’s decided to let it land without flinching.
“You cut your hair,” he says.
I did. A year and a half ago, in a fit of post-Rowan sleep deprivation, I chopped off six inches. It sits at my shoulders now, easier to manage, easier to keep out of reach of tiny grabbing hands.
He noticed.
Three years and no contact, and the first thing he notices is my haircut.
“Three years,” I say, “and that’s what you’ve got?”
His mouth almost curves. Almost. He catches it before it becomes a real expression, schools his face back to neutral, but I saw it. That ghost of a smile that used to undo me completely.
It doesn’t undo me now. I won’t let it.
“Maren.” Patricia, or Priscilla, whatever, is looking between us with wide eyes. “Mr. Calloway is overseeing the purchase. You’ll be working together on the-”
“I know who he is.”
The words hang in the air. Rhodes doesn’t look away from me. I don’t look away from him.
Three years of anger, grief, humiliation, and something else, something I refuse to name, refuse to acknowledge, refuse to give any oxygen at all, sits between us like a living thing.
He opens his mouth.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
The caller ID says LITTLE SPROUTS.
My heart stops for an entirely different reason.
“I have to take this,” I say, and I’m already moving, already turning toward the door, because nothing else matters when that number lights up my screen. Not Rhodes, not the contract, not any of it.
I hear his voice behind me-“Maren, wait” but I’m already gone.