Chapter Ten
SIENNA
Grant called on day twelve, not to plead the way he had those first frantic days, but with a proposal, delivered carefully, like he'd rehearsed it.
"You should get your things," he said. "Whatever you need, whatever you want.
I'll make sure I'm not there. I'll go stay at the Hendersons' place or a hotel, whatever's easier, so you don't have to see me while you do it. "
I agreed, after a day of considering it, because the alternative, leaving my whole life behind indefinitely, unclaimed, felt worse the longer I sat with it, and because something in the careful, unpressured way he'd offered it suggested he understood, at least this once, what I needed better than I'd expected him to.
Rachel offered to come with me. I told her I needed to do it alone, and she didn't argue, just squeezed my hand before I left and told me to call if I changed my mind about that halfway there.
The house was exactly as I'd left it, which was somehow the strangest part, as if the rooms themselves hadn't registered that anything had changed.
My coffee mug still sat in the drying rack from the morning I'd left.
A note I'd written myself about a dentist appointment still clung to the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like the Eiffel Tower we'd bought on a trip neither of us could really afford at the time.
I moved through the house slowly, room by room, a box in one hand and a growing, complicated feeling in my chest that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with the sheer volume of a life built over seventeen years, all of it sitting quietly in place, waiting for a decision I hadn't expected to be this hard to make.
In the bedroom, I found the sweater Grant had given me for our fifth anniversary, soft gray wool I'd worn until the elbows thinned, and folded it into the box without hesitation.
I found the photograph from our wedding that had always sat on my side of the dresser, the two of us laughing at something just out of frame, a moment neither of us could remember the cause of anymore but had never stopped loving the evidence of. I took that too.
I stood for a long time in front of the closet, looking at a row of designer dresses the studio had gifted me over the years for various events, each one worth more than my entire wardrobe from the Fig Street years combined, and understood, standing there, that none of them meant anything to me at all, that they belonged to a version of my life I'd been performing rather than living, and I left every single one of them hanging exactly where they were.
In the guest room, the box with North of Anywhere sat exactly where I'd left it weeks earlier, the flaps still closed the way Grant must have left them after finding me going through it that night.
I lifted the lid and looked down at the yellowed pages for a long moment before deciding, with a certainty that surprised me, that this, of everything in the house, was the thing I could not leave behind.
I carried it out to the car myself, cradled against my chest like something fragile, before I went back in for the rest.
I found, in the kitchen drawer where we kept odds and ends, the mismatched mug Grant's grandmother had given him, the one we'd toasted with the night of the audition tape, chipped at the handle from years of use, and I almost left it, telling myself it was silly to want an ugly, chipped mug from a woman I'd only met twice.
I took it anyway, unable to fully explain why, only that leaving it there felt like leaving something true behind along with everything I was rightfully leaving.
The hardest moment came in the hallway, in front of the row of photographs I'd looked at on the night of the premiere without knowing yet what was coming.
I stood there for a long time, looking at the picture of us in front of the Fig Street building with the moving truck behind us, both of us so young and unguarded and certain of something neither of us could have named yet.
I didn't take that one. I left it exactly where it was, on the wall, in the house, because some part of me understood that the photograph belonged to the house and to the marriage as it had existed, and taking it with me would have felt like pretending the years since hadn't happened at all.
I left with three boxes, one lamp I'd always loved that Grant had never particularly cared for, and the small suitcase I'd originally packed the night I left, now considerably heavier than it had been.
I left behind a house full of expensive, beautiful things that meant nothing, and took with me a chipped mug, a wedding photo, and fourteen years of unfinished pages that meant everything.
Before I left, I stood for a while in the doorway of the small home office Grant had built for himself two years earlier, a room full of scripts and awards and framed magazine covers documenting the entire visible architecture of his career, and understood, looking at it, that there was no equivalent room anywhere in the house for mine, that seventeen years of my own quiet, uncredited contributions to both our lives had never once been given a wall of their own to hang on.
I didn't take anything from that room. I only stood there a moment, absorbing the specific, quiet unfairness of it, before closing the door behind me and carrying my three boxes out to the car.
Driving away, I understood something I hadn't expected to understand that day.
Leaving the house hadn't hurt the way I thought it would.
I still loved pieces of the life built inside it, but I could finally see clearly which pieces of that life had actually been mine to begin with and which had only ever belonged to the story other people had been telling about us.