Chapter Five—Lorna
I ARRIVE AT THE LODGE a little after seven in the morning, pull beside the woodshed, and sit with the engine running.
The porch looks the same as it did in July.
The replacement posts from last year’s rebuild are still lighter than the older wood, and a pile of leaves has collected against the bottom step.
Nothing is broken. No unfamiliar car waits farther up the drive. Nobody steps out from behind the house.
I turn off the engine.
The quiet settles around me almost immediately.
My body hasn’t caught up with the fact that I’m here. My hands shake when I reach for my overnight bag, and my throat still hurts when I swallow. I stand beside the car for a minute, looking at the lodge until the tremor eases enough to get the key into the lock.
Inside, the air smells closed up. Pine boards, old wood, and the faint dust of a house that’s been empty since summer.
I leave my bag by the door and go through the practical things first. Water heater.
Breaker for the upstairs rooms. Kitchen faucet until the sputtering stops and the water runs clear.
Then the locks.
Front door. Back door. Mudroom. French doors off the living room. I test every window downstairs and walk through both bedrooms upstairs with my phone in my hand.
Nobody is here.
I make it back to the kitchen before my legs give out.
I sit on the floor with my back against the lower cabinets and cry hard enough that my sore throat protests. There isn’t anything graceful about it. My face hurts. My nose runs. At one point I make a sound I wouldn’t willingly make in front of another human being.
Nobody hears me. That’s why I came here.
Eventually, there’s nothing left. I stay on the floor until the tile gets uncomfortable beneath me, then get up, wash my face at the kitchen sink, and drink two glasses of water.
My reflection in the dark window looks terrible. Bruising circles both wrists. There’s discoloration near my temple and along one side of my neck. My hair has been in the same loose knot since yesterday.
I turn away from the window. There are things I need to do.
The legal pad in the junk drawer is exactly where I left it. I take it to the kitchen table and write PHONE at the top of the first page.
Chris’s office manages our shared plan. That means Fenton can access the account, and I have no intention of asking him for permission to separate my number from it.
I open my laptop and start a new account with another carrier.
My phone supports an eSIM, so I don’t have to wait for anything to arrive.
I choose a new number, move the handful of authentication services I need immediately, and keep the old line active long enough to transfer the rest after I’ve slept.
Then I turn off every location-sharing setting I can find.
Chris has always been able to see where I am.
I stare at his name under the sharing menu for several seconds before tapping Stop Sharing My Location.
The confirmation disappears almost immediately.
There should be more ceremony to ending that kind of access.
There isn’t.
I move on to passwords.
Email first. Banking. Cloud storage. My newsletter platform. Social accounts. Website administration. Payroll. The shared drive Brooke and Mia use for scheduled content. I replace text-message verification with an authenticator app wherever I can and generate backup codes that I save offline.
It takes almost two hours.
A security prompt asks for my honeymoon destination.
Lisbon.
I don’t use it.
I type the name of the street where I lived when I was nineteen instead.
The next prompt asks for my spouse’s middle name. I choose another question.
By ten-thirty, I have three pages of crossed-off accounts and a headache forming behind my eyes. I make coffee with grounds that expired two months ago and drink it anyway while I search for divorce attorneys.
The first three websites use photographs of smiling couples shaking hands across conference tables. I close all three.
The fourth belongs to a woman in Asheville whose biography is mostly credentials and whose site doesn’t promise anyone a peaceful new beginning. I like her immediately.
She has a consultation opening Thursday afternoon.
My cursor stays over the appointment button. I haven’t decided to divorce Chris.
Last night, I left my rings on a hotel key card and drove across two states without telling my husband where I was going, which is probably a distinction only I would bother making.
I book the appointment. A consultation isn’t a filing. It means I won’t walk into the next part of my life without knowing what my options are.
By noon, I’ve done everything urgent.
That’s when the day gets harder.
There are no more passwords to change, no accounts to separate, and no appointment to schedule. Nothing needs an answer from me.
I stand in the middle of the kitchen and listen. The lodge has its own collection of sounds. The refrigerator cycling. Water moving through the creek below the property. Wind in the hardwoods. Something small skittering across the porch roof and disappearing before I can identify it.
No elevator. No footsteps in the hallway outside the penthouse. No delivery cart. No phone ringing in another room.
I love it.
My stomach growls, so I open the refrigerator and find two bottles of sparkling water and the box of baking soda I left in July.
The grocery store is twenty minutes down the mountain. I change into jeans and a sweatshirt, pull my hair into a ponytail, and drive there with the windows cracked.
The woman in front of me at the checkout buys four bags of apples and tells the cashier she’s making enough apple butter to supply her entire church. Nobody recognizes me. Nobody asks why I haven’t posted in days. Nobody looks at the bruises hidden beneath my sleeves.
In the parking lot, an older woman returning her cart glances at my groceries. “You staying up the mountain?”
“I have a place near Grandfather.”
She looks toward the ridge. “Good week for it. Rain’s supposed to hold off until Wednesday.”
“That’s good.”
“Leaves will be prettier by next weekend.” She smiles and pushes her cart toward the return.
I put my groceries in the back seat. That’s the whole interaction, but I drive away strangely grateful for it.
Back at the lodge, I scramble eggs with butter and salt because anything more ambitious requires more concentration than I have. I toast two slices of bread and eat at the kitchen counter while looking through the window over the sink.
I finish everything. I haven’t done that in weeks.
Fear has made eating another job. It doesn’t matter that nobody has ever tampered with my food. Once enough ordinary things start carrying messages, ordinary stops being easy. I wash my plate and go outside.
The trail behind the lodge needs attention. Sumac has pushed into the path in several places, and one of the steps cut into the slope has washed out along the edge. The creek is low enough that I can see stones that were underwater in July.
I cross the footbridge and inspect the southern fence. One post is leaning.
“Figures.” My voice sounds strange after hours alone.
I push on the post. It moves more than it should. That goes on tomorrow’s list.
The perimeter camera above the trailhead still shows a full charge. I installed it last spring after the first photographs appeared in Charleston. It took a ladder, a drill, and two instructional videos because the first time I tried to mount it, I put the bracket on backward.
The second attempt worked.
I open the app and scroll through the recent motion history.
Deer.
Raccoon.
Another deer.
A delivery truck from three weeks ago that turned around at the top of the drive after realizing it had the wrong address.
Nothing else. I breathe easier and lock my phone. The lodge has always been mine in a way almost nothing else is anymore.
I bought it the year before I met Chris.
I’d been in Asheville for a catalog shoot that ended two days early when the client changed the final setup.
Instead of flying home, I rented a car and drove north with no plan beyond wanting two days where nobody was adjusting my hair, measuring my waist, or asking me to hold the same expression for another twenty frames.
A handwritten FOR SALE sign at the bottom of this road made me turn.
The lodge wasn’t pretty then. Half the porch railing was missing. The upstairs bathroom had avocado tile. One kitchen cabinet hung crooked enough that I couldn’t open it without lifting the door first.
The realtor spent forty minutes explaining everything wrong with it.
I kept walking from window to window. “What would something like this cost to fix?” I’d asked.
She named a number, and I could afford it. That startled me more than the number itself.
For years, modeling money had been something I saved because I knew my face had an expiration date in the industry even if nobody said so. I invested most of it, spent carefully, and assumed I’d use it eventually to build whatever came next.
I hadn’t expected part of whatever came next to have avocado tile and a damaged porch. I made an offer before I drove back to Asheville.
The first time I brought Chris here was a year into our marriage.
He’d walked through the front door, looked at the old stone fireplace, and said, “You own this?”
“I told you I had a place in North Carolina.”
“You said cabin.”
“It has logs in several locations.”
He’d laughed and carried our bags upstairs.
We stayed four full days. Chris cooked with me because there wasn’t anywhere nearby he wanted to order from. We hiked to the creek, got caught in rain on the way back, and spent one afternoon on the porch doing absolutely nothing.
The second morning, I’d been sitting cross-legged on the wicker love seat scrolling through paint samples while Chris stood at the railing with his coffee.
“We should come back in the spring,” he’d said. “When everything’s green.”
I’d looked up. “You’d want to?”
He turned. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“You hate the mattress.”