CHAPTER TWENTY MAREN
Icalled my mother that night instead of anyone else, and Sabine Aveline answered on the second ring the way she always had, ready, as if she’d been waiting by the phone for exactly this call for weeks.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told her, and it was the first time in two months I’d said those words out loud to another human being without immediately following them with a plan someone else had suggested.
“Then don’t decide tonight,” she said. “Come stay with me and Hollis for a while. Nobody in this house is going to tell you what’s right for you.
We tried that with your father once, when he was deciding whether to take the transfer that would have moved us across the country, and it went badly enough between all of us that I swore I’d never do it to you, not about anything this important. ”
I drove to my mother’s the next morning, leaving the beautiful, empty house behind without a backward glance, and spent the following days in the quiet, undemanding company of my family.
My brother Hollis teased me gently over coffee about the state of my life, the way he’d teased me since childhood, a running joke about my apparent talent for attracting complicated men that somehow managed to feel loving rather than cruel.
My mother refused, exactly as promised, to offer an opinion on whether I should forgive Rhodes, deflecting every attempt I made to draw one out of her with the same gentle firmness.
“You’ll know,” she said, more than once, kneading dough at her kitchen counter while I sat nearby doing nothing useful at all. “Not today, probably. But you’ll know, when the time comes, and it won’t be because I told you what to think.”
Lying awake one of those nights in my childhood bedroom, the same narrow bed I’d slept in as a teenager, I finally saw the pattern whole, the way you sometimes only see a shape once you’ve stepped back far enough from it to take in the entire outline.
Delphine had decided what was best for Rhodes, certain that her decades of devotion entitled her to interfere with his choices.
Cal had decided what was best for me, certain that his years of quiet love entitled him to shape my understanding of my own marriage.
Rhodes had decided what was best for both of us when he sent me away without my consent, certain that his fear entitled him to override my voice entirely.
Three people who claimed to love me or love him, and every one of them had called control by the name of love, and every one of them had been wrong in the exact same way, mistaking their own certainty for a right to decide.
I spent two weeks at my mother’s house doing very little of anything, reading old novels from my childhood bookshelf, helping Hollis repaint his back fence, sitting on the porch in the evenings watching the light fade over a neighborhood I’d known since I was a girl.
I started running again during those weeks, something I hadn’t done regularly since college, lacing up an old pair of sneakers I found in the back of my childhood closet and following the same route through the neighborhood I’d run a hundred times as a teenager, past the elementary school, along the creek path, back up the hill toward my mother’s porch.
The physical exertion gave my mind somewhere to go that wasn’t Rhodes or Cal, and I found, by the end of the first week, that I looked forward to it the way I once looked forward to Sunday mornings, a small, private ritual that belonged entirely to me.
I also, finally, called Dr. Ferris back and accepted the consulting position formally, signing the paperwork at my mother’s kitchen table with a pen Hollis had to dig out of a junk drawer, and felt, putting my signature to the page, a settling kind of certainty that had nothing to do with either man and everything to do with a version of myself I’d nearly let disappear.
“You look different,” Hollis said one evening, watching me come in from a run, sweaty and out of breath and more at ease than he’d seen me in months. “Lighter.”
“I feel different.”
“Good,” he said simply, and didn’t push for more, which was exactly the gift I needed from him in that moment.
My mother took me to church one Sunday during those two weeks, an invitation rather than an expectation, and I sat beside her in the pew where I’d sat as a girl, letting the familiar rhythm of the service wash over me without paying much attention to the sermon itself, more comforted by the ordinary continuity of it than by anything specifically said.
Afterward, in the church parking lot, an old family friend asked after Rhodes with obvious curiosity, clearly having heard some version of events through the small-town grapevine, and I watched my mother deflect the question with practiced grace, giving away nothing, protecting my privacy without my even having to ask her to.
“Thank you for that,” I told her in the car afterward.
“You don’t owe anyone an explanation for what you’re working through,” she said. “Not now, and honestly, not ever, regardless of how it ends.”
I thought often, during those two weeks, about a conversation I’d had with my father years before he died, back when I was still in college, uncertain about a relationship that had ultimately gone nowhere.
He’d told me, sitting on this same porch, that the measure of a good decision wasn’t whether it felt certain in the moment, but whether it still felt sound after the emotion driving it had faded.
I found myself testing every possible outcome against that standard during my time at my mother’s house, imagining myself a year from now having stayed away entirely, imagining myself a year from now after going back, trying to determine which version of the future still felt sound once I stripped away the immediate anger and grief and fear driving my thinking in any given hour.
I talked to Hollis about it directly one evening, sitting on the porch steps while he worked on the fence he’d been repainting all week, needing someone who’d known both Rhodes and Cal to help me see the situation from outside my own tangled perspective.
“Can I ask you something honestly?” I said. “Did you ever suspect Cal wanted more than friendship? Before any of this happened, I mean. Years ago.”
Hollis set down his paintbrush and considered the question seriously.
“I always wondered, honestly. He used to look at you a certain way at family gatherings, back before you met Rhodes. I never said anything because it wasn’t my business, and because you never seemed to notice it yourself, and I figured if it mattered, you’d figure it out eventually. ”
“Why didn’t you say something when all of this started? When I first called him?”
“Because you needed a friend at that exact moment, and he was the friend available. I didn’t think it was my place to plant doubt about someone you were leaning on for support, especially when I didn’t have anything concrete to point to, just an old feeling from years ago.
” He picked the brush back up, considering his next words carefully.
“I’m not saying that to excuse myself. I probably should have said something.
I just didn’t want to be another person deciding things for you without your permission, given everything else that was already happening to you that way. ”
I sat with that, the irony of it settling slowly.
Even my own brother’s silence, offered with the best of intentions, had been another small instance of someone managing my reality rather than trusting me with the full picture, though his reasoning, unlike Cal’s or Rhodes’s, had come from genuine respect rather than any hidden agenda.
“I don’t blame you,” I told him. “I think I needed to find this out for myself anyway. I don’t think I would have believed it if you’d told me a month ago.”
“Probably not,” he agreed. “You’ve always had to learn things the hard way, Mare. Ever since we were kids.”
I didn’t call Rhodes. I didn’t call Cal.
I let my phone sit largely untouched on my nightstand, a small act of defiance against the idea that I owed either man an immediate answer about anything.
Rhodes texted twice during those two weeks, brief, careful messages that asked nothing of me, simply letting me know he was there if I ever wanted to talk, each one ending with some version of no need to respond, take whatever time you need, a restraint that surprised me given how little of it he’d shown in the month before.
I didn’t respond to either message, though I read them more times than I would have admitted to anyone.
By the end of those two weeks, I decided that whatever happened next, nobody else was going to make the decision for me again.
Not Rhodes. Not Cal. Not even the fear that still lived in my chest when I imagined either outcome, staying away for good or eventually going home.
I would decide, in my own time, on my own terms, and if that meant taking longer than either man wanted me to take, that was simply a cost they would have to accept.