CHAPTER SEVEN MAREN
Ididn’t sleep that night.
I lay in the dark on my side of the bed, Rhodes a careful, silent distance away on his, both of us awake and both of us pretending otherwise, the gap between us wider than it had ever been in six years of marriage despite the fact that neither of us had moved an inch further from the center of the mattress than usual.
Around two in the morning I heard him shift, and for a moment I thought he might reach for me, might say something that would let the whole terrible arrangement dissolve back into an ordinary disagreement we could resolve in the morning over coffee.
He didn’t. I heard him sigh, and turn onto his back, and eventually his breathing slowed into something that might have been sleep or might have been a very good performance of it, and I lay beside him feeling more alone than I had in years, in a bed I’d shared with him since the week we married.
The car came at six.
Everything was already arranged, exactly as he’d said it would be, and the completeness of the arrangements was its own kind of violence, a violence made of good intentions and careful planning and not one single question asked of me about what I might have wanted included.
A suitcase, packed by someone else’s hands, sat by the front door when I came downstairs, clothes in my size selected by someone else, folded around toiletries I hadn’t requested.
A flight had been filed under a name that wasn’t mine, some alias Bram’s team had generated for the manifest. Money had been moved into an account with my name on it and absolutely no explanation attached, a gesture that managed to feel simultaneously generous and deeply insulting.
I sent the packed suitcase back upstairs without a word and packed my own bag instead, refusing the assistant Rhodes had sent to help, a young woman named Priya who looked deeply uncomfortable standing in our bedroom doorway watching me fold my own sweaters.
There was a difference, I told myself, folding each item with more care than the task strictly required, between accepting his money and accepting his hands arranging my life into a suitcase for me, and I intended to hold onto every scrap of that difference I could find.
He stood in our bedroom doorway while I worked, saying nothing, and I felt his eyes on my hands the whole time, memorizing something he wasn’t ready to lose, the particular way I folded a sweater, the specific books I decided to bring, the small worn photograph of my father I kept in my nightstand that I now tucked carefully between two shirts.
“You don’t have to watch,” I said, not looking up.
“I want to.”
“Why? So you can feel like you were here for this part, even though you’re the reason it’s happening?”
He didn’t answer, and I let the silence sit there, cruel and deserved in equal measure, while I finished packing.
Near the end, I reached for my wedding ring, intending, I think, simply to make sure it was secure before a day of travel, and instead found my hand refusing to move past the dresser, setting the ring down on the wood without deciding to do it in advance, my body simply declining to carry it out the door under these terms, as though some part of me had already reached a verdict my mind hadn’t caught up to yet.
I saw him see it.
I saw the moment cost him something enormous, watched him take one step toward me like he might stop the entire arrangement he’d built, his hand half raised as though he might reach for the ring himself, put it back on my finger, tell me none of this was really happening the way it appeared to be happening.
He didn’t.
“The car’s ready,” he said instead, and his voice had gone rough enough to almost undo my resolve. Almost.
I left the ring on the dresser and walked out to the car without looking back at the house, because I already knew what I’d see if I did: every light on despite the early hour, every camera watching, and my husband standing in the doorway of a home he’d just decided I couldn’t live in anymore, a home I had spent six years turning into something that belonged to both of us and that now, apparently, belonged entirely to him and his decisions.
Teo drove me to the airport in silence, glancing at me twice in the rearview mirror with an expression I couldn’t quite read, something between sympathy and discomfort, a man caught in the middle of something far above his position to comment on.
I didn’t cry until we were halfway there, and even then I did it quietly, facing the window, refusing to let the sound of it reach the front seat.
“Mrs. Vossler,” he said finally, as we pulled up to the private terminal, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror. “For what it’s worth, I’ve driven for this family a long time. I’ve never seen Mr. Vossler look the way he looked standing in that doorway just now.”
“That doesn’t change anything, Teo.”
“No, ma’am. I don’t suppose it does.” He put the car in park and turned to face me properly for the first time. “I just thought you should know it wasn’t nothing to him. Whatever else it was.”
I thanked him, because he meant it kindly, and because some small, stubborn part of me needed to hear it even as the rest of me refused to let it matter yet.
The plane was small and private and staffed by two people I’d never met who treated me with a careful, professional gentleness that made everything feel worse rather than better, as though I were something fragile being transported rather than a woman flying to a house she had never agreed to live in.
I spent most of the flight staring out the window at clouds that gave no indication of how far I was traveling from everything I knew, running the conversation in my study over and over, searching each exchange for the moment I could have said something different, done something different, found some sentence that might have changed the outcome.
I found nothing. There had been no version of that conversation, I finally admitted to myself somewhere over what I guessed was Ohio, where Rhodes had actually intended to be moved by anything I said.
The decision had been made long before he walked into my study. I had simply been the last to know it.