Chapter 2 #2
He was pacing now. Short, tight loops in front of the windows.
The ocean was behind him, flat and bright in the early morning, and it looked like a painting — the kind of painting she would have hung in a gallery, the kind of thing she would have noticed the light on, if he'd ever bothered to ask about her work.
"Annabel, please." His voice was different now.
Lower. The boardroom polish was cracking, and underneath it was something rawer — not vulnerability, not yet, but the panic of a man who had never failed to talk his way out of a crisis and was watching his words bounce off a wall.
"We can get through this. People get through this.
We'll go to therapy. We'll do whatever you need.
Just — please don't make a decision right now when you're—"
"When I'm what?"
He stopped pacing. "Upset."
"I'm not upset." She stood up. Pushed the chair in. Picked up the iPad and tucked it under her arm. "I'm clear. For the first time in a long time, I'm very clear."
She walked past him. Down the hallway. Up the stairs.
Into the master bedroom where his jacket was still draped over the armchair and his watch was on the nightstand and the sheets on his side were pulled back from when he'd given up pretending to sleep.
The room smelled like his cologne. She breathed through her mouth.
She pulled a bag from the top shelf of her closet.
Not a suitcase — a leather weekender, the one she used for gallery openings in the city.
She packed quickly. Five days' worth of clothes.
Her laptop. Chargers. The small case of jewelry she actually cared about — her grandmother's earrings, the watch she'd bought herself after her first curated exhibition nine years ago.
She left everything Alistair had given her.
The diamond studs. The Cartier bracelet.
The sapphire pendant from their fifth anniversary.
She zipped the bag and turned around.
He was in the doorway. Not blocking it — standing just to the side, one hand on the frame. But his body was angled toward the center of the opening, and she understood the geometry.
He wasn't going to grab her. He wasn't going to raise his voice. He was going to fill the space with words and hope they were enough.
"Don't do this," he said. "Not like this. If you need space, I'll go. I'll leave. You stay in the house. I'll go back to the city tonight and you can have all the time you—"
"I don't want the house."
"Annabel."
"I don't want the house, Alistair. I don't want the city apartment. I don't want your time or your therapy or your performance of a man who's sorry." She shifted the bag to her other shoulder. "I want you to move."
He didn't move.
"I'm leaving now," she said. "You can stand there, but I'm going to walk through that door, and if you make me go around you, that's the last image of this marriage I'll carry. Your choice."
Something broke in his face. She saw it happen — a fracture behind his eyes, quick and total, like a crack spreading through glass.
For one half second she saw the man she'd married.
Not the one who sent voice messages to another woman.
The one who'd held her hand so tightly at her father's funeral that she'd found bruises the next day and hadn't minded.
He stepped aside.
She walked past him. Close enough to feel the heat off his skin. Close enough to smell his cologne — the one she'd chosen for him years ago, before she'd learned that choosing things for Alistair was just another form of maintenance he didn't notice.
She didn't look at him. She looked straight ahead, down the hallway, toward the stairs.
"Annabel." His voice behind her. Cracked at the edges. "I love you. Please."
She kept walking.
Miriam was at the front door. The car was in the driveway — a black sedan, engine running, driver's side door open. Miriam had her own bag in the back seat, a small overnight case. She'd packed without being asked.
Annabel stopped on the front steps. The morning sun hit her face. The air smelled like salt and cut grass and the roses that the gardener tended along the east wall — the roses Alistair had planted the first summer they'd bought the house, back when he still did things with his hands.
"Ready?" Miriam said.
Annabel nodded.
She got into the back seat. Miriam closed the door behind her. The leather was cool. The air conditioning was already on. Outside the window, the house sat massive and white against the blue sky — four stories of old money and ocean views and a life she'd helped build and hadn't known was hollow.
Miriam pulled out of the driveway and turned east on the Montauk Highway. The estate shrank in the side mirror — the white columns, the stone wall, the iron gate with the S worked into the scrollwork. It got smaller and smaller and then the road curved and it was gone.
Annabel looked down at her hands in her lap. They were perfectly steady.
She watched the road. The trees blurred past. The ocean appeared and disappeared between the houses, bright flashes of blue between the hedgerows. She didn't cry. She didn't call Corinne. She didn't reach for her phone.
She sat in the back seat of the car and let the distance grow, and with every mile she felt something loosen in her chest — not relief, not yet. Just the first breath after a long time underwater.
Miriam's eyes found hers in the rearview mirror. Steady. Knowing. Miriam didn't say anything. She didn't need to. Fifteen years of watching this family had taught her when words were useful and when they were just noise.
Annabel looked back out the window.
The highway stretched ahead of them. Long and flat and open. She didn't know where they were going. She hadn't told Miriam, and Miriam hadn't asked.
It didn't matter. She was moving. That was enough.