CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PARIS
Imani’s guest room had a window that looked out over her small backyard, and I lay there the first few nights unable to sleep, running through a year of small corrections and larger silences, feeling something underneath the grief that surprised me by how much it resembled relief.
Mornings at Imani and Elliot’s settled into a rhythm faster than I expected.
Elliot made coffee before either of us was fully awake, the same way Mark used to, and the three of us fell into an easy, unremarkable routine, toast burned twice that first week because none of us paid attention to the toaster’s actual settings, the radio tuned to whatever station Elliot preferred, low enough not to interrupt conversation.
I helped cook most nights, chopping vegetables while Imani managed the stove, and there was something steadying about the division of labor, nobody’s job bigger than anyone else’s, nobody managing an evening around what somebody more important might need from it.
I watched Imani and Elliot disagree, once, over something as small as whether to accept an invitation to a colleague’s dinner party neither of them particularly wanted to attend.
Elliot wanted to go, out of obligation to a work relationship.
Imani didn’t, flatly, and said so, and the disagreement lasted exactly four minutes, conducted at a normal volume, resolved with Elliot going alone and Imani staying home guilt-free, neither of them diminished by having wanted something different from the other.
I sat at the kitchen table watching the whole exchange unfold and understood, with a strange, late clarity, that I had forgotten disagreements were allowed to look like that, ordinary, survivable, over almost as soon as they started.
One evening I forgot my badge for Harborview at the townhouse, discovered it missing halfway through my commute, and stood on the train platform for a full minute actually considering whether I wanted to go back for it or ask Mark to leave it somewhere for me to collect without seeing him.
I decided, in the end, to borrow Dahlia’s spare instead and deal with the badge another day, and the fact that I could make that decision so simply, without it becoming a referendum on the whole marriage, felt like its own small, private victory.
Elliot and I fell into an easy, unhurried friendship of our own during those weeks, separate from whatever role he played as Imani’s husband.
He asked me, one evening, to look over a set of accessibility specifications for a community health center he was designing, curious whether the clearances he’d drawn would actually work for someone using a walker rather than just meeting code on paper, and I spent an hour at his drafting table pointing out where his hallway widths would technically pass inspection and still frustrate an actual patient.
He revised the plans on the spot, genuinely grateful, and told me afterward that he wished more of his clients cared enough to ask the question at all.
It was a small thing, being useful to someone in a context that had nothing to do with my marriage or my history, and I drove the feeling home with me like something worth keeping.
I hadn’t understood how much of myself I had quietly worn down to fit into a life that had stopped making room for me.
I noticed it in specific ways once I had distance to see it.
I wore the green wool dress Nadine had never approved of to dinner with Imani and Elliot and felt, absurdly, like I was getting away with something.
I told a long, unpolished story about Mrs. Okafor’s parallel bars and didn’t once wonder whether it was interesting enough for the room.
One night I laughed so hard at something Elliot said about a client’s disastrous kitchen renovation that I had to set down my wine glass, and caught myself afterward feeling strange about it, almost guilty, as though laughing that freely while my marriage sat unresolved constituted some kind of betrayal of the grief I was supposed to still be carrying.
Imani noticed the look on my face and told me, simply, that being able to laugh again wasn’t proof I didn’t still hurt.
It just meant I wasn’t only the hurt anymore.
I signed up, on a whim, for a half marathon in the spring, something I’d wanted to do for two years and had quietly shelved because Mark’s calendar never seemed to leave room for the training schedule, and I laced up my old running shoes the next morning and ran four miles before work for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, feeling something in my body wake up that had been asleep for a while.
It wasn’t easy, not at first. My second week of training, I hit mile five on a long Saturday run and simply stopped, standing on the sidewalk with my hands on my knees, lungs burning, legs shaking, absolutely certain I couldn’t manage the last two miles back.
A woman running the opposite direction slowed and asked if I was okay, and I told her, honestly, that I’d overestimated myself, and she laughed, not unkindly, and said everybody in this group had a story exactly like that one.
“I’m Priya,” she said. “First marathon, fifty-two years old, and I threw up after my first six-mile run. You’re doing fine.”
We walked the last two miles together that day, mostly in comfortable silence, and I discovered, over the following weeks, that Priya had no idea who Mark Walsh was, no interest in Ridgeway Capital, no context for anything about my life beyond what I offered her over post-run coffee.
We talked about nothing that mattered and everything that did, her daughter’s difficult divorce, my patients, the ordinary misery of a Boston winter that refused to end, and I found, without quite planning it, that I liked being simply bad at something in front of someone, liked the humility of struggling openly at a skill I hadn’t yet earned, in a way my whole marriage had somehow trained me out of allowing myself.
Mark texted, and called, and sent flowers to Imani’s house that I asked her to donate to the hospital instead of putting in a vase.
I didn’t answer most of it. Not out of cruelty, but because I had learned, the hard way, that answering too quickly had always been how the pattern renewed itself, an apology, a gesture, a return to normal that never actually addressed what had broken.
At work, I threw myself into the new post-surgical program that Harborview had been wanting to build for a year, and Dr. Okonkwo-Reyes stopped by unannounced one Thursday afternoon, catching me between patients, and told me directly that two other hospitals in the network had heard about our outcomes and wanted to know whether the model could be replicated.
“This is your program,” she said. “I want your opinion before I tell them anything. Do you think it would translate, or is this specific to what you’ve built here?
” I hadn’t expected to be asked, hadn’t expected my opinion to be the deciding factor in anything beyond my own treatment rooms, and I spent the rest of that afternoon turning the question over with something that felt, unmistakably, like pride.
The launch itself, when it finally came, drew a small write-up in the local health section, no photographers, no gala, just a quiet, accurate account of the work I’d built with my own hands over eighteen months, and it was Dahlia, of all people, who noticed the shift in me before I said anything about the separation.
“You seem different,” Dahlia said. “Lighter, kind of. Is everything okay?”
“Mark and I are taking some time apart,” I said, and saying it out loud, plainly, to someone who had once forwarded me a photograph without knowing what it would do to me, felt like setting down something heavy I’d been carrying without permission to put it anywhere.
“For what it’s worth,” Dahlia said, “I hope whatever happens, you stay exactly like this. This version of you seems like she knows exactly who she is.”
Nadine called twice. The first time I let it go to voicemail.
The second time I answered, and she started, predictably, with an apology that wasn’t quite an apology, something about not meaning to overstep, and I told her, gently but clearly, that I wasn’t ready to talk about dresses or luncheons, and that if she wanted a relationship with me going forward it would need to start from an honest accounting of how she’d treated me, not a graceful pivot around it.
She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, in a smaller voice than I’d heard from her in years, that she would think about that, and we left it there.
I did not know yet whether I was going back to my marriage.
I knew, for the first time in a long while, exactly who I was without it, and that knowledge felt like solid ground under feet that had been standing on something shifting for far too long.
Some nights I missed Mark so completely it felt physical, an actual ache I couldn’t locate anywhere specific.
Other nights I slept better alone than I had in over a year.
I let both things be true at once, without rushing to decide which one mattered more.