CHAPTER TEN MAREN
Istopped letting the staff plan my days by the end of the first week.
It started small. I told Renata I’d make my own breakfast, just once, just to see if I remembered how, and found the simple act of cracking eggs into a pan in an unfamiliar kitchen more satisfying than it had any right to be, a small, ordinary reclamation of a life that felt, in every other respect, entirely out of my hands.
After that, I decided what I would eat for myself.
I walked the property’s grounds on my own schedule instead of the one someone else had built around shift changes I was never told about, learning the rhythm of the security rotation simply by observing when the guards at the gate seemed most relaxed.
Small things, but they belonged to me in a way nothing else in that house did, and I held onto them the way you hold onto a railing on a staircase you don’t trust, one careful, deliberate handhold at a time.
Cal stayed the whole first week, sleeping in one of the six empty bedrooms, and our days settled into an easy rhythm that felt, in its way, like the first genuinely comfortable thing I’d experienced since Rhodes said yes in my study.
We took long walks around the property’s perimeter, well within the bounds the security team allowed, and talked about everything and nothing, old friends from high school, a road trip we’d taken the summer before college that had ended with a flat tire and four hours stranded on a Nebraska highway laughing until we cried.
He remembered details about that summer I’d nearly forgotten myself, the specific radio station we’d argued over, the gas station where I’d bought the ugliest sunglasses either of us had ever seen and worn proudly for the rest of the trip.
“You always did that,” he said one afternoon, watching me deadhead a rose bush I’d claimed as my own small project on the property. “Found something to fix with your hands when things got hard. I remember you reorganizing your entire closet the week after your dad died.”
“I don’t remember telling you that.”
“You didn’t have to tell me. I was there for most of it.” He smiled, easy, familiar. “Some things just stick with you about a person.”
I didn’t think much of the comment at the time, filed it away as simply another piece of evidence for how well he knew me, how comfortable I felt in his presence compared to the careful, curated comfort of the house around us.
Rhodes called four times that week. I let each one go to voicemail, then deleted the voicemails without listening to them, telling myself it was self-preservation rather than punishment, though I suspected it was some of both.
“You don’t owe him immediate access just because he’s decided he’s ready to talk,” Cal said, the third time my phone lit up with Rhodes’s name across the kitchen table and I let it ring out, watching the screen until it went dark.
“He made a decision without you. He doesn’t get to make the timeline for the conversation about it too. ”
It was a reasonable thing to say. It was, in fact, exactly what I might have said to a friend in my position, and that reasonableness was precisely why it slid so easily into the architecture of how I understood what had happened to me, without my ever once questioning whether Cal had a reason of his own for wanting the distance between me and Rhodes to hold a little longer than it might otherwise have.
I let the fifth call go to voicemail too, and this time I didn’t feel the small pang of guilt that had accompanied the first four, only a settling kind of resolve that felt, at the time, entirely like my own.
I started keeping a small notebook that week, an ordinary thing, spiral bound, that I found in a kitchen drawer and claimed for myself, and I began writing in it every evening before bed, nothing grand, just an accounting of the day, what I’d cooked, what I’d read, how the light had looked over the western hills where the property backed up against a stretch of undeveloped land.
It became a private ritual, the one part of my day that belonged entirely to me and to no one else’s plan, and I found myself looking forward to it the way I once looked forward to Sunday mornings with Rhodes, a small, steady comfort in a life that otherwise felt entirely unmoored.
Cal noticed the notebook one evening, glancing at it on the kitchen table before I closed it. “What’s that?”
“Nothing important. Just a way to keep track of things.”
“You used to keep a journal in high school too. Do you remember? The one with the terrible floral cover you were so embarrassed about.”
“You have a frighteningly good memory for the embarrassing parts of my adolescence.”
“Somebody has to keep the record,” he said, easy and unbothered, and I laughed along with him, not yet hearing the particular weight underneath the words that I would only recognize much later, once I’d learned to listen for it.
By the end of the second week, I had reorganized the kitchen to my own preferences, moved the furniture in the sitting room to angles that made more sense to me than whatever interior decorator had originally arranged it, and started, tentatively, to think of the beautiful, empty house as something closer to mine, at least for the duration of my stay in it.
It was a small, incomplete kind of ownership, built entirely out of necessity rather than choice, but it was mine nonetheless, and I clung to it.