CHAPTER SIX MAREN
He told me on a Tuesday.
I remember the day specifically because it had started so ordinarily, coffee at the island, the crossword abandoned halfway through because neither of us could agree on a six-letter word for “unwavering,” a small domestic argument that had nothing to do with anything and that I would spend weeks afterward wishing I’d paid closer attention to, the way you sometimes want to hold onto the last few minutes of something before you understand it’s the last few minutes at all.
He came to find me in my study a little after four, standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his voice arranged into something flat and careful, a register I’d never heard him use with me before, the register I imagined he used with his board when delivering news he’d already decided wasn’t up for discussion.
“Maren. I need to talk to you about something.”
“Okay.” I set down my pen, giving him my full attention, some instinct already telling me this wasn’t going to be one of our ordinary conversations. “What’s going on?”
“You’re going to stay somewhere safe for a while. I’ve already made the arrangements.”
I sat very still, letting the sentence settle, waiting for the part that would make it make sense. “Made the arrangements,” I repeated. “Not asked me. Made them.”
“There isn’t time to negotiate this, Maren. Not after last night.”
“Rhodes, I need you to slow down and explain this to me properly, because right now it sounds like you’re telling me you’ve already decided something about my life without me in the room for the decision.”
“I have,” he said, and I watched something in his face harden, the way it did when he’d made up his mind about a business decision and was preparing to defend it against every objection his board could raise.
“There’s a house. It’s secure, it’s staffed, it’s completely off any registry Fenwick or anyone he’s hired could find. You’ll leave tomorrow morning.”
“I’m not a shipment, Rhodes. You don’t get to deploy me somewhere like I’m cargo you’re routing around a security risk.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Then tell me what it is. Actually tell me, instead of just informing me it’s happened.”
He was quiet for a long moment, and I watched him search for the words, watched the struggle play out across his face, and some part of me, even then, wanted so badly to believe he was searching for the honest version of the explanation rather than the version that would make me leave without a fight.
“The breach last week proves the threat is real and it’s close,” he finally said. “I need to run this investigation without also managing your exposure every hour of every day. I need to know you’re somewhere he can’t reach while my team finds him.”
“Then let me help you figure out what that looks like. Together. The way we’ve handled every hard thing in six years of marriage. You don’t get to unilaterally decide what my safety requires and then tell me about it after the fact like you’re briefing me on a business decision.”
“There isn’t time for a committee meeting about this, Maren. Every day the fence stays vulnerable is another day someone could reach you.”
“I’m not asking for a committee meeting. I’m asking to be a person in the decision instead of a problem you’re solving.”
“That’s not fair, Maren.”
“Isn’t it? You walked in here with a house already secured, staff already hired, a departure time already set for tomorrow morning, and you’re telling me the only thing left to discuss is how quickly I can pack. Tell me what part of that isn’t a problem you’ve already solved without me.”
He crossed to the window, his back to me, and I watched his shoulders rise and fall with a breath he was clearly working to steady.
“I keep seeing the fence in my head. Over and over. Someone stood there for God knows how long, studying our blind spots, waiting for the exact six seconds our system couldn’t see them.
And all I can think is what if the six seconds had been enough.
What if I’m sitting here explaining a plan to you instead of identifying your body. ”
“Rhodes.” My voice softened despite myself, some old, automatic instinct to comfort him rising up even through my own fear. “I understand you’re terrified. I am too. But being terrified doesn’t mean you get to stop treating me like your partner.”
“I don’t know how to do both,” he said, turning back to face me, and for a moment he looked younger than I’d ever seen him, stripped of every ounce of the composed authority he wore into board meetings and negotiations.
“I don’t know how to be your partner and also live with the thought of losing you.
Every instinct I have says solve the problem as fast and as completely as possible.
Every instinct I have says get you somewhere he can’t reach and worry about how you feel about the method later. ”
“That instinct is going to cost us something, if you follow it all the way through.”
“I know that. I still don’t know how to override it.”
“Then let me help you override it,” I said, moving closer, reaching for his hand. “That’s what a marriage is for, Rhodes. You don’t have to solve this by yourself. You never had to.”
For one long moment, his fingers curled around mine, and I thought, standing there in the fading afternoon light of my study, that we had found our way through it, that the crisis would end here, in this room, with the two of us listening to each other instead of letting either of our fears decide for us.
Something in his face flickered, and for one moment I thought I saw the crack where the honest version of this conversation might have come through, where he might have told me about the fear that had kept him awake for three nights, about Delphine’s suggestions arriving gently and repeatedly until they’d started to feel like his own conclusions, about the property he’d found and the shell corporation and the staff hired for their silence.
I thought, standing in my study with my husband’s face doing something complicated and unreadable, that he was about to tell me the truth.
He didn’t.
“I need this to happen quickly,” he said instead, and I felt his hand slip from mine as he stepped back, some door closing behind his eyes that had been open only a second earlier. “I need you to trust me on this.”
“I do trust you. That’s not the problem.
The problem is you’re asking me to trust a decision you won’t fully explain, and those aren’t the same thing.
” I searched his face, looking for the man who’d stood at the window a moment ago admitting he didn’t know how to hold both his fear and his respect for me at once.
“Talk to me the way you were just talking to me. Don’t retreat back into the man who just gives orders. ”
“This isn’t me giving orders.”
“It’s exactly that, Rhodes. You’ve told me what’s happening. You haven’t asked me a single question about what I want, what I can live with, what I’d decide if you actually gave me a say.”
“What would you decide?” he asked, and for a moment I thought it was a genuine question.
“I don’t know yet, because you haven’t given me enough information to decide anything. Tell me what Bram actually found. Tell me who this house is registered to. Tell me how long you expect this to take. Tell me anything real instead of just the outline of a decision you’ve already made.”
“It doesn’t change the outcome, Maren.”
“It changes everything about how I experience the outcome. There’s a difference between being asked to trust someone through something frightening and being told what’s going to happen to your own life while you stand there with no say in it at all.”
“Maren.”
“Have I become a burden to you?” I asked, and I hated how small the question made me feel even as I asked it, hated that six years of marriage had led me to a moment where I genuinely didn’t know the answer.
He didn’t answer fast enough. I watched him search for the correction and fail to find it in time, his mouth opening and then closing again, and the failure told me more than any answer could have, a silence with more weight in it than anything he’d said in the whole conversation.
“Do you want me gone?” I asked, and my voice came out smaller still, fear doing something to it that I’d spent years learning to prevent.
“Yes,” he said.
The word stayed there, filling the room until there wasn’t space for anything else, not the crossword from that morning, not the six years of Sunday mornings and terrible coffee and a private four feet of gravel where nobody could see me, not the promise he’d made me at the altar, whatever happens, we face it together.
I thought of that promise specifically, standing in my own study looking at my own husband, and I understood, with a clarity that felt almost physical, that promises could be broken by the very people who meant them most sincerely when they made them.
“Rhodes,” I said, giving him one more chance, one more opening. “Is that true? Do you actually want me gone, or is this fear talking?”
He was quiet for what felt like a very long time, long enough that I let myself hope, one final time, that he was searching for the honest answer rather than the convenient one.
When he finally spoke, his voice had gone flat again, retreating fully now into whatever armor he’d built around this decision before he ever walked into my study.
“It doesn’t matter which one it is,” he said, and even that answer, evasive as it was, might have been enough if he’d stopped there, if he’d let the crack widen into an actual explanation. He didn’t. “You’re leaving in the morning. I’ve already had everything arranged.”
“You keep saying that. Already arranged. As though the arranging is the part that matters, instead of the fact that you did it without me.”
“I don’t know how else to keep you safe.”
“You don’t know, or you didn’t try? Because those are different failures, Rhodes, and I need to know which one I’m standing across from right now.”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters more than almost anything else you could say to me tonight.” I felt my throat tighten, the tears I’d been holding back finally threatening to break through.
“Because if you didn’t know how, that’s fear, and fear I can work with.
But if you didn’t try, if some part of you decided it was simply easier not to include me, then this isn’t really about Fenwick at all.
It’s about what you think a wife is for. ”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Then prove it. Right now. Tell me one thing about this plan that came from a conversation between the two of us instead of a decision you made alone in your office.”
He didn’t answer. The silence stretched long enough that it became its own answer, more complete than anything he could have said aloud.
“Then I suppose there’s nothing left to discuss,” I said, and the words came out steadier than I felt, some deep instinct for self-preservation taking over where the rest of me had started to shake.
I walked past him toward the door, because staying in that room with him for one more minute would have broken something in me that I wasn’t ready to let him see break, not yet, not while there was still a version of this where I could hold myself together long enough to pack a bag with my own hands.
He didn’t stop me. I heard him say my name once, quietly, as I reached the hallway, and I kept walking anyway, because some part of me already understood that the man calling my name from that study wasn’t offering me anything I could use.
I locked myself in the guest bathroom for twenty minutes after that, sitting on the edge of the tub with my knees pulled up to my chest, letting myself shake and cry in a space where he couldn’t see it happen, because some stubborn, wounded part of me refused to let him witness what his decision had actually cost, not that night, not while there was still a chance he might mistake my grief for something he could talk his way around.