Chapter 8
The ferry pulled away from Anacortes at ten minutes past eight, and Iris stood at the rail with a paper cup of coffee she didn't want, watching the wake churn white against the gray-green water.
The morning was overcast in the way the San Juans always were in early summer — clouds sitting low and close like a lid on a pot, promising to burn off by noon without quite committing to it.
Gavin was somewhere below deck. She'd seen his car in the ferry line — the black Range Rover, not the Porsche, which meant he'd thought about it, chosen the less conspicuous vehicle — and she'd kept her eyes on the Subaru's dashboard until the ferry workers waved her forward.
Separate cars. Elena had been firm about that.
"You drive yourself," Elena had said on the phone two days ago, her voice carrying the clipped efficiency of someone who'd managed a thousand property walk-throughs and knew exactly how they went sideways.
"You arrive separately, you leave separately.
The appraiser runs the show. You're there to confirm the inventory list and flag anything the other party might contest. That's it. "
"I know what an appraisal walk-through is, Elena."
"You know what it is in theory. In practice, it's four hours in a house full of your marriage, with the man who broke it standing three feet away. So I'm telling you again: separate cars."
Iris had said fine. She'd said it the way she said most things to Elena lately — agreeably, without argument, because arguing took energy she was hoarding for other battles.
The TechCrescent piece had dropped two days after the gala.
Kelsey Brandt had been thorough. Fourteen months of Edgewater bookings, sourced and timestamped, laid out in a timeline that made Gavin's "brief lapse" sound like what it was: a lie told in a hotel lobby by a man who'd had months to rehearse it.
Iris had read the article once, on her phone, sitting on the houseboat floor with her back against the kitchen island.
She'd read it the way you read a medical report — scanning for the facts, skipping the narrative, trying not to let the language land.
Then she'd set the phone face-down on the counter and gone upstairs to the studio and worked on the SAM proposal sketches until her hand cramped.
She hadn't read it again.
The ferry rounded the point, and the islands materialized out of the haze — dark fir trees crowding down to rocky shorelines, the occasional white house catching what little light there was.
San Juan Island was forty minutes from here.
The house was another fifteen by car, on the west side, facing Haro Strait with the Olympic Mountains behind it.
They'd bought it the second year of their marriage, when Gavin's first company went public and the money went from theoretical to obscene.
He'd wanted Orcas Island. She'd wanted San Juan because the light was better for painting and because Friday Harbor had a bookstore she liked.
He'd bought San Juan without discussion, which she'd taken as generosity at the time and recognized now as the first of many negotiations he'd won by simply not having them.
#
The appraiser was a woman named Jean Kowalski — late fifties, steel-gray braid, Patagonia vest over a flannel shirt, clipboard tucked under her arm like a professor heading to lecture.
She was already on the porch when Iris pulled into the gravel drive, and she shook Iris's hand with the kind of businesslike warmth that said she'd appraised plenty of divorcing couples' houses and had no interest in anyone's feelings about it.
"Mrs. Rogers. I've got the exterior measurements done already. We'll start with the main level and work up."
"Iris is fine."
"Iris, then." Jean glanced past her toward the road. "Your husband's about five minutes behind you. I saw him at the gas station in Friday Harbor."
Iris nodded and turned toward the house, and something shifted in her chest — not pain, exactly, but the muscular anticipation of pain, the way you brace before a needle.
The house looked the same. Cedar shingles weathered to silver.
The blue door she'd picked from a paint deck their first summer, holding the sample chips up to the light while Gavin stood behind her and said they all looked identical to him.
The porch was deep and wide, with two Adirondack chairs she'd bought at a farm stand on Cattle Point Road, and between them the small iron table where they'd eaten dinner on warm evenings — salmon and salad and whatever wine was open, the strait going pink and gold in front of them.
She made herself walk up the steps.
Inside, the house smelled like dust and cedar and the ghost of woodsmoke from a fireplace no one had lit in months.
The main level was open — kitchen flowing into the living area, big windows on three sides, the water visible from almost every angle.
The furniture was covered in sheets. Someone from the property management company had draped them, she assumed, though the effect was funereal, like a house in mourning for the people who'd stopped coming.
Iris set her bag on the kitchen counter and pulled the sheets off methodically, folding each one into a square because the alternative was standing still and feeling things.
The couch. The reading chair. The dining table they'd bought at an antique shop in La Conner — reclaimed fir, scarred and beautiful, too heavy for two people to move without swearing at each other.
She was folding the last sheet when she heard the gravel crunch outside.
#
Gavin came in quietly. That was new — the quietness. The Gavin she'd married entered rooms like he owned them, which he usually did. This Gavin stood in the doorway and waited, as if the house required permission he no longer had the right to give himself.
"Jean's starting with the kitchen," Iris said, not looking at him. "She wants us to flag anything that's separately owned versus jointly acquired."
"Okay."
He looked thinner. She noticed it and resented noticing it — the way his shirt collar sat looser, the sharper line of his jaw.
He hadn't shaved that morning, or he'd shaved badly, and there was a patch of stubble along his neck that he'd missed.
She knew the geography of his face well enough to spot the error, and she hated that too.
Jean moved through the kitchen with her clipboard, photographing cabinets and appliances, asking neutral questions about renovation dates and purchase receipts.
Iris answered most of them. Gavin deferred, standing near the window with his hands in his pockets, only speaking when Jean asked him directly.
"The range?" Jean asked. "Viking. When was it installed?"
"Twenty-eighteen," Iris said. "April."
"She's right," Gavin said. "We had the whole kitchen redone that spring."
The "we" hung in the air like smoke. Iris moved past him to open the pantry, and their shoulders didn't quite touch, but the proximity registered in her body — the warmth of him, the particular soap-and-skin smell that eighteen years of marriage had wired into her nervous system at a level below conscious thought.
She stepped away. Opened the pantry. Inside: canned goods, a box of pasta, a bottle of olive oil with an inch left in the bottom. The detritus of a life that had assumed it would keep being lived here.
"This is all joint," she said. "None of it matters."
Jean made a note and moved on.
#
The house was not large by Rogers standards — three bedrooms, two baths, a mudroom, the porch. By any normal standard it was beautiful, and the appraisal moved slowly because Jean was thorough and because the house kept ambushing Iris with its memories, one room at a time.
The guest room where Linnet slept on her visits, complaining about the mattress and then refusing to leave for days.
The bathroom with the clawfoot tub that Iris had found at a salvage yard in Bellingham and spent a whole weekend refinishing, Gavin handing her sandpaper and holding the flashlight and being, for once, content to be the assistant instead of the architect of the project.
The porch. Jean measured it and moved on, but Iris stood there for a moment longer than she should have, looking at the two chairs angled toward each other with the iron table between them.
They'd talked about children on this porch.
Not abstractly — specifically. Names and timelines and whether the San Juan house had enough bedrooms or whether they'd need to add on.
Gavin had wanted two. Iris had wanted to finish the thing she was working on first — the painting, the project, whatever it was that year — and then they'd try.
And then the year after that she'd said the same thing.
And then Constance got sick, and the conversation stopped, and now here they were, dividing the furniture in a house built for a family that never materialized.
She didn't know whose fault that was. Maybe nobody's. Maybe the absence of children was just another thing that had happened to them, like weather, and the affair was the thing Gavin had chosen, and the difference between those two categories was everything.
"The porch chairs are mine," she said to Jean. "I bought them separately."
Jean made a note.
#
By noon the clouds had burned off as promised, and the strait was a deep, complicated blue that Iris's fingers itched to mix on a palette.
They broke for lunch — Jean ate a sandwich on the porch, and Iris and Gavin ended up in the kitchen at the same time, moving around each other with the unconscious choreography of two people who had shared a kitchen for nearly two decades.
He opened the refrigerator. She opened the cabinet above the stove. He stepped left as she stepped right. They didn't collide. They didn't speak. The rhythm was still there — bone-deep, automatic, a duet neither of them had consciously learned.