The Marriage They Rebuilt (Second Chance Grovel Marriage #1)

1. Tara

TARA

The zipper on the last suitcase stuck at the corner, and I worked it back and forth until it gave.

Down on the circular drive below the window, my husband’s driver pulled the town car away from the front steps. This was the driver who came at eight-fifteen on days when Thomas didn’t take the wheel himself.

I knew the schedule just like I knew which stair treads creaked and which doors liked to slam shut. Five years will teach you these things, whether you plan to learn them or not.

The scar on my right thumb caught the zipper tab as it went past. My father had wrapped that cut in his bandanna when I was fourteen and told me every carpenter earns one. I stood there a second longer than I needed to, thumb against the tab, and then I finished zipping the bag.

The guest wing had good light, especially in the morning. The master wing belongs to Constance, so Thomas and I had kept our suite here on the third floor, long-term guests in his mother’s house.

The light was what I’d miss, if I let myself keep a list, and I wasn’t doing that.

I packed according to the prenup. Schedule P and its annual addenda covered the personal property. The jewelry, gifts, clothing, and accessories, every item typed out in a lawyer’s meticulous hand.

There was a lot of jewelry I rarely wore. Earrings from our third anniversary, the watch from the fourth, the sapphire necklace Constance had the family jeweler reset for my birthday one year. The original setting was, in her opinion, common.

I took it all. Not out of sentiment. They were assets, small and liquid, and a woman starting over at thirty might need fast cash someday.

I wrapped each piece in a sock and nested them in a shoe, which was more care than Constance’s jeweler would have demanded and less than the pieces were insured for.

Packing the clothes went fast. Work pants, jeans, blouses, tees, blazers and jackets, the dress boots, pajamas and intimates. Whatever an office job in Philadelphia was going to ask of me, I could dress for it out of two suitcases.

The fancy things—the silk and the beaded and the strapless—I left hanging in the dressing room closet, arranged by color the way the housekeeper liked it. Those weren’t clothes. They were costumes issued by the family institution for required events, and I was done attending them.

My work boots went in last, along with my canvas jacket and the camera I’d had since college, the cheap one with the dented body. Those were things from my pre-prenup life. Items not on any schedule.

There was an account I’d had since the engagement, opened under Callahan, my maiden name, at a bank the Montgomery family didn’t use.

As part of the prenup, Thomas deposited a generous stipend into it every month, automatically, and I’d used it so rarely that the balance had swollen into a substantial amount.

The account was mine free and clear under every line item the lawyers had drawn. And my husband’s monthly generosity paid for my escape. The attorney’s retainer, the lease deposit, the SUV waiting for me out front.

The cell phone number Thomas had for me was disconnected now. Its replacement was in my bag, shared only with Dana, Declan, and the Commission.

Three weeks ago, there was a dinner. Constance at one end of a table built for twelve, Thomas at the other, me in the middle where she liked me, in range. Thomas’s brother Bennett was there, too, along with two board members and their wives.

Somewhere between the soup and the fish, my brother’s name came up.

Apparently, Declan had been flagged on the Church Street restoration site for a safety violation.

A mark like that ends a tradesman’s commercial working life in a city the size of New York.

He’d disputed it, claiming the flag came after he raised questions about a material substitution on the site.

Constance delivered all this with her voice never rising, only sharpening, and then she set down her spoon and waited for my response.

I looked at Thomas. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t look surprised either, which meant the dispute had reached him before it reached me. And I had to hear it from his mother.

He set his knife across his plate, straightened it, and said, “Let it go, Tara. The timing’s bad with the stock where it is. I’ll have the issue reviewed after the quarter. If they mishandled him, I’ll make it right quietly.”

Declan’s reputation was on the line, and I was supposed to just let it go? The brother who raised me after our parents died deserved better.

I didn’t push back or defend him. That’s the part that was hard to forgive myself for. I ate the fish, answered a question about the ballet, and forced my hands to stay steady on the silver while seething inside.

Everyone at the table read my silence as agreement, Thomas included. It was the most expensive misreading of his life, and he made it over fish.

I excused myself before dessert. Constance allowed it with a nod she probably practiced in the mirror, and I climbed the stairs to our suite. That was the night my escape planning stopped being a folder on a laptop and became a scheduled event.

Thomas came to bed after midnight. I was awake, facing the wall, watching the clock burn through one blue number after another. He set his phone on the nightstand, and after a while he said into the dark, “Declan will land on his feet. Good carpenters always do.”

He believed it when he said it. Just like he believed a comparable in a valuation, a number he’d read somewhere and never walked through. He was asleep in minutes. I lay there another hour, next to the man who ended my brother’s commercial working life, and gave my escape the go-ahead.

I’d been leaving Thomas in bits and pieces for a while before then, and had even applied for a job at the Philadelphia Historical Commission. The video interview was done from my laptop in a coffee shop in Midtown with my earbuds in and a spreadsheet open in the background.

On the application, under preferred name, I wrote Tara Callahan.

It went into the field like tenon goes into mortise, shoulders seated, no persuading required.

Montgomery had always felt like a borrowed name, something I was introduced by rather than someone I was.

I didn’t examine the choice too hard. A measurement doesn’t need understanding to be correct.

The offer, when it came through, was negotiated over email. The only thing left to do was accept the job, which I did after that dinner. The lease came fast behind it. Then a start date.

Now it was time to go.

I did a last pass through the suite. Bed made, surfaces clear, drawers closed. On the shelf by the window, six of my books stayed behind in their new bindings, matching green cloth, my titles re-stamped in gilt to coordinate with the room.

Some decorator had done that the second year.

I’d found them one afternoon, my beat-up paperbacks gone, replaced by a set of well-dressed soldiers.

Thomas had called it a sweet surprise when I told him, and I’d agreed that it was sweet.

It was easier back then to agree with small thefts, though it became harder over time. I left the soldiers at attention.

The room, when I was done with it, looked unremarkably tidy. My father would have meant it as criticism. For me it was more about not making waves. That’s when I realized how good I’d gotten at making suppressed anger look like good housekeeping.

I carried the suitcases down myself. The staff offered to help. I thanked them and declined, and if any of them guessed that I was leaving for good, none of them called me out on it.

The main stairway served as a portrait gallery for the Montgomery family members. So far, it filled the wall all the way up to the second-floor landing, with the oldest at the bottom. The frames began in heavy gilt and morphed into the restrained frames Constance chose for herself and her family.

I’d walked past the portraits a thousand times. The men all looked similar. Black suits and ties with white shirts. The wives were all different. The kids didn’t get portraits until they were adults.

The first wife was lovely and wore perfect pearls.

Several steps up, another wife was posed next to a vase of roses, her lips the same red as the roses.

Then further up there was Constance, handsome at forty, holding a forced smile that said she’d once been told she wasn’t beautiful and had decided to make the best of it.

After Thomas and Bennett, there was my portrait, painted four years ago.

The talented artist had gotten the gray-green of my eyes just right and then, courteously, edited out my freckles and smoothed my work-weathered hands into something soft and pale, the hands of a true Montgomery wife.

I was set against a background of books like an academic.

Society photographers used to do the same favor without being asked.

My portrait would likely be down by the end of the week. I knew how the collection was managed. The wall would get a quick coat of paint to hide where a frame had been, and by the next social event no one would realize a Montgomery wife was missing.

Outside was an SUV with temporary tags and a man holding a delivery manifest to sign. The SUV was mine. Bought for exactly this. The transaction was done remotely, in my maiden name, paid outright from the stipend account, paperwork signed electronically.

The delivery came right on time, gas tank topped off. It was a good feeling. A plan that runs on time hits the same part of the brain as a job site that finishes clean.

I signed on the hood, tipped the two drivers—the one who’d driven the SUV out and the one in the car behind it, waiting to take him back—and loaded the bags myself.

Even in August, the stone steps behind me seemed cold. I’d noticed it as a newlywed, how cold the house always felt. At first, I’d thought it was a flaw in the heating system. Then I’d wondered if it was a feature of the stone structure. Much later, I’d realized the cold was something else.

I got in and drove.

The house shrank in the rearview mirror. The avenue gave way to the park, green and indifferent on my right, and the city loosened its grip by degrees. I’d driven out of that neighborhood countless times, and the road had never once looked different. Until today.

I didn’t feel free, or sad, or much of anything other than relief.

Somewhere past the state line, the phone buzzed against the console. I picked it up at the next rest stop, engine still running, one bar of service flickering on the screen.

Dana Whitcomb, my attorney, texted like she billed: efficiently.

He’s been served.

I read it twice. Then I tossed the phone on the passenger seat. For about ten seconds I just sat there, engine idling. Then I got back on the road.