CHAPTER FIFTEEN MAREN
Istarted making plans that had nothing to do with Rhodes, out of necessity rather than spite, the way you start rebuilding a house the moment you accept the old one isn’t standing anymore, brick by careful brick, without any grand announcement of the project to anyone but yourself.
I moved a portion of my savings into an account under my name alone, a modest sum I’d accumulated over the years from freelance research work I’d done before Rhodes and continued, in smaller amounts, throughout our marriage, work I’d let quietly lapse over the past two years without ever quite deciding to stop.
I called an old professor from graduate school about the research position I’d set aside years earlier for a life that had, at the time, seemed like the better bargain, a position in environmental policy analysis that had once excited me more than almost anything else in my life before Rhodes’s world had gradually absorbed most of my working hours into gala planning and foundation boards.
“I wondered if I’d ever hear from you again,” Dr. Ferris said warmly, when I finally worked up the nerve to call. “We have a part-time consulting position opening in the fall. Would you be interested?”
I said yes before I’d fully thought through the logistics of it, a small, reckless yes that felt better than almost any decision I’d made in months.
I spent that same afternoon reopening an old email account I’d barely touched in years, one I’d used exclusively for my own professional correspondence before Rhodes’s assistants had gradually absorbed most of my scheduling into their systems, and found, scrolling through the unread messages, an entire abandoned version of myself sitting there waiting, invitations to conferences I’d declined, a co-authored paper I’d never finished revising, a mentor who’d written twice over the past two years simply to check in and see how I was doing.
I answered every message I could still meaningfully respond to, and felt, with each reply I sent, a small piece of that abandoned self settling back into place.
I began looking, quietly, at apartments in a city three hours from either of the lives I’d been living, using the search engine on my phone late at night after Cal had gone to bed, scrolling through listings for one-bedroom apartments with good natural light and building committees that didn’t require security clearances.
I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing, not even Cal, some private instinct insisting that this particular reclamation needed to belong entirely to me before I shared it with another living soul.
I found myself, some mornings, walking the property’s grounds alone before anyone else woke, the air still cool with dew, thinking through a life I hadn’t seriously considered in years, one where I taught a seminar or two each semester, where I set my own schedule and answered to no one’s security concerns but my own reasonable judgment.
It felt, in those quiet hours, less like escaping my marriage and more like discovering that I had never fully stopped being a person with ambitions of my own, ambitions that had simply gone dormant rather than disappeared.
One afternoon I pulled out an old research proposal, something I’d half-drafted years earlier on watershed policy in agricultural communities, and found myself absorbed in revising it for the first time in what felt like a genuine act of reclamation rather than distraction.
I worked through the afternoon and into the evening, filling pages of a legal pad with notes, cross-referencing studies I remembered from graduate school, feeling a specific, focused satisfaction I hadn’t experienced in years, the particular pleasure of a mind engaged with something entirely its own.
Renata brought me dinner on a tray that evening because I’d lost track of the hour entirely, and stood in the doorway for a moment, watching me work.
“You look happy,” she observed. “Actually happy, not the performing kind.”
“I think I’d forgotten what this felt like. Having a project that’s just mine, that doesn’t belong to anyone else’s calendar or anyone else’s crisis.”
“Don’t let it go again,” she said simply, and left, and I sat with that instruction for a long time after she’d gone, understanding that she’d offered me something more valuable than she probably knew, a piece of wisdom earned, I suspected, from her own life rather than simply observation of mine.
I called Hollis one evening, needing a voice that had known me before any of this, before Rhodes, before Cal, before any of the careful architecture other people had built around my life without my full participation.
“You sound different,” my brother said, after we’d talked for nearly an hour about nothing in particular. “Lighter, somehow. Is that strange to say, given everything that’s happened?”
“I don’t think it’s strange. I think I’d forgotten what I sounded like when I wasn’t managing someone else’s calendar.”
“Mom’s worried about you.”
“Tell her I’m all right. Tell her I’m actually more all right than I’ve been in longer than I want to admit.”
Cal drove me to two of the apartment viewings the following week, having somehow learned about the search despite my efforts at privacy, carrying boxes I hadn’t asked him to carry and remembering details about my preferences that surprised me with their accuracy, the number of windows I liked a room to have, the specific pale blue shade of paint I’d once mentioned in passing years earlier during a conversation I barely remembered having.
“You always wanted a reading nook,” he said, standing in the corner of the second apartment we toured, gesturing at the bay window overlooking a small courtyard garden. “Remember that apartment you almost took after college? Before you met him? You had that whole plan for a window seat.”
“I can’t believe you remember that.”
“I remember everything about you, Mare,” he said, and something in the way he said it, quiet and a little too warm, made me look at him more closely than I had in weeks, though I still couldn’t quite name what I was noticing.
“You’ve been so generous with your time,” I told him later that evening, over dinner at a small restaurant near the second apartment, some instinct finally prompting me to acknowledge what I hadn’t quite let myself examine.
“Six hours away from your own life for weeks now. I don’t know how to thank you properly for that. ”
“You don’t need to thank me. I’d do anything for you.
I always have.” He said it simply, without any apparent weight behind it, and I let the comment pass the way I’d let a dozen similar comments pass over the preceding weeks, filing it under the general category of old, devoted friendship rather than examining it for anything more specific.
Our friendship, already easy, deepened into something that felt, in those weeks, like the safest place I had left, a refuge from a marriage I no longer fully trusted and a solitude that had started to feel unbearable in the too-quiet house.
If some part of me noticed the way his hand lingered a half second longer than friendship required when he helped me out of the car after the second viewing, I told that part of myself it was reading too much into grief, into loneliness, into the natural physical comfort of an old friend during a difficult time.
He was not reading too much into anything. I understand that now. At the time, I only understood that being around him calmed me, and I did not yet understand that calm could be engineered as carefully as any of the security protocols Rhodes had built around our house.
I began teaching myself, that same week, small practical skills I’d never bothered learning during six years of a marriage where someone else always handled the logistics of ordinary life.
I learned to change a flat tire, standing in the property’s long gravel drive with a video paused on my phone, sweating through the instructions twice before I finally got the lug nuts loose.
I learned to file my own taxes properly instead of simply signing whatever Rhodes’s accountant prepared each year, spending an entire weekend with tutorials and a calculator, feeling a small, fierce satisfaction each time a number came out correctly on my own.
Renata found me hunched over a spreadsheet one evening, muttering at a formula that refused to balance, and laughed, not unkindly, offering to bring me tea.
“You don’t have to learn all of this yourself, you know,” she said. “There are people who do this for a living.”
“I know there are. I think I need to know I can do it myself, though. Just this once. Just to prove to myself I’m not entirely dependent on someone else’s competence.”
“That’s a fair thing to want,” Renata said, and left the tea, and didn’t mention it again, though I noticed, in the weeks that followed, that she began treating me less like a guest with no departure date and more like a woman genuinely building something of her own inside a life that had, for a while, felt entirely borrowed.