CHAPTER EIGHT RHODES
Iwatched the car pull away from an upstairs window because I couldn’t make myself stand in the driveway and watch her leave at ground level, couldn’t make my legs carry me that close to the thing I was doing to her.
From the window, at least, I could pretend some distance existed between the decision and its execution, a lie I told myself with the same practiced ease I’d used to tell myself, for the past week, that this was mercy rather than cruelty dressed up in the language of protection.
I told myself this was temporary, that the moment Fenwick was in custody I would fly to that house myself, tell her everything, every detail I’d withheld, and bring her home to a life with better locks and no more secrets between us.
I believed every word of that plan with total conviction, the way a man believes his own alibi, turning it over in my mind until it felt less like a justification and more like a simple, obvious fact about the future.
Bram found me still standing at the window twenty minutes after the car had disappeared down the road.
“She left the ring,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“I saw.”
“Does she know you’re planning to bring her home once this clears?”
“She knows I love her, Bram. She’ll understand once I explain the whole picture.”
“You keep saying she knows things you haven’t told her,” Bram said, with the particular bluntness he only used when he judged the situation serious enough to risk my temper, a bluntness I’d valued in him for nine years and now found almost unbearable to be on the receiving end of.
“I’ve worked for you nine years. I’ve never seen you make a call this big without telling the person it lands on hardest what the call actually is. ”
“I couldn’t risk her arguing me out of it.”
“Maybe that’s because some part of you knew she’d win the argument,” he said, and left before I could answer, which was its own kind of mercy, because I didn’t have an answer that survived contact with the truth in his voice, not that morning and not for a long time afterward.
I went to my office and tried to work, and found I couldn’t concentrate on anything longer than a few minutes before my mind returned, unbidden, to the image of her hand refusing to carry the ring out the door, setting it down on the dresser with a small, deliberate motion that had said more than any argument could have.
I picked up my phone four separate times that first day intending to call her, and put it down four separate times, telling myself she needed time to settle in, that a call too soon would only reopen a wound I’d just finished inflicting.
By the second day the house had gone unbearably quiet in a way I hadn’t anticipated, despite the fact that Maren and I often spent entire evenings in companionable silence, each absorbed in our own reading or work, occupying the same rooms without needing to fill every minute with conversation.
This silence was different. It had teeth.
I found myself standing in doorways she used to occupy, noticing the absence of her coffee mug on the counter, the missing weight of her presence in the bed at night, a woman-shaped hole in every room of a house I’d built specifically to keep her safe inside it.
Delphine called that evening to ask how the transition had gone, and I told her, more honestly than I meant to, that it had been the worst morning of my marriage.
“It gets easier,” she said. “Once you know she’s safe, the rest will settle.”
“It doesn’t feel like it’s settling. It feels like I’ve hollowed out my own house.”
“You did the right thing,” she said, with such certainty that I let myself believe her, at least for that evening, at least long enough to fall into a few hours of restless sleep before Fenwick’s name pulled me awake again at four in the morning.
I spent that first week in a kind of controlled frenzy, arriving at the office before six and leaving after eleven, filling every waking hour with work because work was the only thing that quieted the specific ache of walking past our bedroom each morning and finding her side of the closet half empty, a handful of dresses she hadn’t taken hanging there like evidence of a life still technically ongoing.
Stellan called on the third day, having heard some version of events through channels I hadn’t authorized.
“Your mother wants to know why Maren didn’t come to her sister’s dinner last night,” he said, with the particular directness he’d never entirely lost from his own days running the company.
“I told her Maren was traveling. She didn’t believe me. ”
“Maren is traveling. In a manner of speaking.”
“Rhodes.” My father’s voice carried a warning I recognized from childhood, the tone he used when he suspected I was managing a problem instead of solving it.
“I’ve run a security company for thirty-five years.
I know what it looks like when a man’s protecting someone and I know what it looks like when he’s controlling them, and from where I’m standing, you should think very carefully about which one this is before you tell your mother anything else. ”
I told him I was handling it. He said nothing for a long moment, and then, quietly, in a way that stayed with me for days afterward, “I handled a great deal in my life by deciding for your mother what she needed to know. It cost us four years of a marriage I still don’t fully understand how we got back.
Don’t assume you’re smarter than I was, son.
I wasn’t stupid either. I was scared, the same as you. ”
I didn’t call Maren that week, though I picked up the phone more times than I could count, the alias on her flight manifest sitting in my mind like a small, constant accusation.
I told myself I was giving her space. I understand now that I was also protecting myself from hearing, in her voice, exactly how much damage I’d done, a cowardice dressed up as consideration that I would spend months learning to recognize in myself before I could finally stop repeating it.