CHAPTER NINE MAREN
The house was beautiful in the specific, empty way of places built for other people’s comfort rather than your own life, all clean lines and expensive neutral tones, the kind of house a magazine might photograph without ever suggesting anyone actually lived there.
Six bedrooms. A pool I never once used. A kitchen stocked with everything I could possibly want and staffed by a woman named Renata who cooked beautifully and asked no questions and made me feel, every time she set a plate in front of me, like a guest with no departure date rather than a resident of anything.
I wandered its rooms for two days feeling like a guest with no checkout date, unable to claim any of it as mine, running my hands over furniture that had been selected by someone else’s taste, sleeping in sheets that smelled of a detergent I didn’t recognize, waking each morning disoriented for the first several seconds before the previous weeks came back and settled on me all over again.
I called my mother the first night and cried on the phone for twenty minutes before I could even explain what had happened, and Sabine Aveline listened without interrupting, the way she always had, and told me only that she loved me and that whatever I decided to do next, she’d support it.
I didn’t call Rhodes. His name appeared on my phone twice that first day and I let it ring through to voicemail both times, unable to make myself hear his voice yet, unable to trust what I might say or, worse, what I might forgive too quickly if I let him talk.
The second day I discovered the closet, a walk-in twice the size of the one at home, already stocked with clothes in my exact size, tags still attached, a wardrobe someone had assembled without ever asking what I might have wanted to wear for however long I’d be living inside it.
I stood in front of it for a long time, running my fingers over silk blouses someone else had selected, before I sat down on the closet floor and simply cried, the specific, humiliating grief of understanding that even my clothing had been decided for me, that there was apparently no detail of my life too small for Rhodes to have arranged in advance.
Renata found me there twenty minutes later, bringing tea I hadn’t asked for, and said nothing about the tears, simply set the cup down beside me and left again, a small, wordless kindness that undid me nearly as much as the closet had.
By the third day, the silence of the house had become its own kind of unbearable, and I picked up my phone and called the one person who’d known me since long before any of this, before Rhodes, before security details and cloned license plates and husbands who said yes when you asked if they wanted you gone.
Calloway answered on the first ring.
“Mare. Hey. Everything okay?”
I hadn’t spoken his name in months, our friendship reduced, over the years, to the occasional holiday text and a birthday call, the natural erosion that happens to childhood friendships once adult lives fill in around them.
But some instinct, some deep and specific memory of a fourteen-year-old boy who’d walked me home after my father’s funeral without saying a single unnecessary word the whole way, had reached for him before I’d consciously decided to.
“No,” I said. “Not really. Can you come see me?”
He was there the next afternoon, having driven six hours without complaint, standing in the doorway of my temporary life with the same open, unhurried face he’d worn since we were fourteen, a little more lined now, a little more solid through the shoulders, but recognizably the same boy who’d once let me cry on his porch for an hour without once telling me to stop.
He didn’t flirt. He didn’t perform sympathy the way some people do, all exaggerated concern designed to center themselves in someone else’s crisis.
He made coffee in a kitchen that wasn’t his, moving around it with an ease that surprised me, and sat with me at a table that wasn’t mine, and listened while I told him everything: the fence, the photograph, the word yes landing in my study like something final and unappealable.
“Do you remember the summer we drove to the lake and my car broke down?” he asked at one point, apropos of nothing, when I’d finally run out of words and simply sat there staring at my hands.
“You mean the summer you refused to admit you were lost for four hours before we finally stopped for directions.”
“I was not lost. I was taking the scenic route.” He smiled, the first real smile I’d seen from anyone in days, and something in my chest loosened slightly at the familiarity of it, at the specific, worn-smooth comfort of a joke only the two of us shared.
“You sat on the hood of that car for two hours while I tried to figure out the engine, and you never once complained. Just sat there eating gas station pretzels and telling me exactly how badly I was doing it wrong.”
“You were doing it badly wrong.”
“I know. That’s why I eventually let you call your dad.
” His smile faded slightly, something gentler taking its place.
“I just mean, you’ve always been steadier than people give you credit for, Mare.
Even now, sitting in a stranger’s kitchen after the worst month of your life, you’re not falling apart the way most people would.
You’re thinking. You’re processing. That’s who you’ve always been. ”
It was a kind thing to say, and I let myself believe, sitting there in the borrowed kitchen, that it was simply kindness, uncomplicated and freely given, the same kindness a childhood friend might offer anyone going through something difficult.
“He wanted you gone,” Cal repeated quietly, when I finished, turning his mug slowly between his hands.
“That’s what he said.”
“Did he explain why? Actually explain it, not just tell you it had to happen?”
“He said it wasn’t safe for me to stay. He said he needed to run the investigation without managing my exposure.”
“That’s not the same as explaining it,” Cal said, and I found myself nodding, because it wasn’t, and because hearing someone else name the gap in Rhodes’s logic felt like relief after days of turning the conversation over alone in my head, wondering if I’d simply failed to understand something that had been perfectly clear to Rhodes.
“Do you know where Delphine’s been staying?” he asked, and the question came so sideways, so unconnected to anything we’d been discussing, that I nearly missed it entirely.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
He shrugged, easy, unbothered, already reaching for the coffee pot to refill my mug.
“Probably nothing. Forget I asked.” But he let the question hang there anyway, the way a person sets down a single puzzle piece and walks away before you’ve noticed it’s shaped like a question you didn’t know you had, and I found myself, later that night, lying awake and returning to it, wondering why a woman I’d known for years and never once suspected had suddenly surfaced in my mind at all.