CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO MAREN
Isaw him first through my brother’s window, three days after the letter arrived, standing in a hardware store parking lot two towns from my mother’s house, in old jeans and a jacket I didn’t recognize, loading lumber into the back of his truck for something I later learned was a fence repair at our old property that had nothing to do with security and everything to do with a neighbor’s dog that kept wandering through a gap near the tree line.
He didn’t know I could see him. He wasn’t performing anything for an audience that wasn’t there, wasn’t dressed for cameras or arranged for effect, simply a man doing an ordinary chore on an ordinary afternoon.
That mattered more than the letter had, though the letter had mattered plenty, its careful, unguarded honesty something I’d read three times alone in my childhood bedroom before I could bring myself to fold it back into its envelope.
I wrote him back a week later, a short letter, nothing like the length or the raw detail of his, simply a few lines confirming I’d received it and that I was still thinking, still watching, still not ready to say more than that.
I agonized over every sentence, wanting to be honest without offering more hope than I actually felt, and in the end I sent something spare and careful, closer to a receipt than a reply.
I received the letter. I’m not ready to answer it yet. I need you to keep doing what you’re doing, whether or not I ever write back again.
I mailed it without telling Hollis or my mother, a small, private act that belonged only to me, and spent the following days wondering whether I’d said too much or too little, whether the careful spareness of it would read as coldness or as exactly the honest caution I’d intended.
News of the public statement correcting the Delphine rumors reached me through my mother, who’d seen it mentioned on the local news, and I read it myself later that evening on my phone, struck by how plainly it was written, no evasive language, no careful hedging designed to protect anyone’s reputation but mine.
I heard, too, through Hollis, who’d heard it from a friend still working at the company, that Delphine had been removed entirely from the family trust, a fact that affected me more than I expected, evidence that Rhodes had actually followed through on consequences rather than simply promising them in a letter.
During those weeks, an impulse I didn’t examine too closely at the time sent me driving past our old house once, and I saw the new fence going up along the north perimeter, saw Rhodes himself out there in old work clothes, sweating through an ordinary Saturday afternoon task rather than delegating it to someone on staff the way he once would have.
I didn’t stop the car. I didn’t let him see me.
I simply drove past slowly enough to take in the sight of him, working with his own hands on the exact place where everything had started to break, and I felt something in my chest loosen slightly, some small, cautious opening toward a version of hope I hadn’t let myself feel in weeks.
Two days later Bram called me directly, not Rhodes, his voice careful and businesslike, with news of a minor security concern connected to loose ends in the Fenwick case, a former associate of Fenwick’s who’d made vague, angry comments online that needed monitoring but posed, in Bram’s assessment, no immediate danger.
“I wanted you to hear it from me first,” Bram said.
“Rhodes doesn’t know I’m calling you. He told me not to report your movements to him, but he didn’t say anything about me keeping you informed on security matters that concern you directly, and I thought you’d rather hear this from someone neutral than have it filtered through him. ”
I sat with that for a moment, surprised by the small, specific kindness of it, the way it demonstrated a genuine shift in how the people around Rhodes were now operating.
“How is he?” I asked, unable to help myself.
Bram was quiet for a moment, considering his answer.
“Different. I’ve worked for that man nine years, Mrs. Vossler, and I’ve never seen him operate this carefully around anything, including multimillion dollar contracts.
He asks himself out loud, before every decision, whether he’s about to do the thing he did to you again.
It’s strange to watch. I think it’s real, though. ”
Rhodes called an hour after that, his voice steady in a way I hadn’t heard from him since before all of this began.
“I wanted you to have the full picture,” he said, and gave it to me plainly, every fact, nothing softened and nothing exaggerated, the exact nature of the associate’s comments, the current assessment of risk, the options Bram’s team had already identified.
Then, instead of following it with a decision already made, he simply stopped talking and said, “What do you want to do?”
I sat with the phone against my ear for a long moment, because I genuinely did not know what to do with a version of this conversation where he offered the facts and then waited, actually waited, for my voice to enter the decision as something more than a formality.
“I want to hire my own security consultant to review it independently,” I finally said, testing him, curious whether the change would hold under even a small amount of pressure.
“Then let’s find you one,” he said, no hesitation, no wounded pride at the implication that his judgment alone wasn’t enough anymore.
“I’ll send you three names Bram trusts by tomorrow morning, and you pick whichever one you want, or none of them, and find your own entirely. This is your call, Maren. All of it.”
It was such a small thing. It shouldn’t have undone me the way it did, sitting in my brother’s kitchen with tears running down my face over a sentence about hiring a security consultant, but it was the first time in six years of marriage that Rhodes had handed me a decision about my own safety and genuinely meant to let me keep it, without a single reservation hiding underneath the offer.
“Rhodes,” I said, before he could hang up. “Thank you. For asking instead of deciding.”
“You shouldn’t have to thank me for that,” he said quietly. “It should have been how I treated you from the beginning. I’m sorry it took losing you to learn it.”
We talked a while longer after that, easier than any conversation we’d had since the fence breach, and near the end of the call, before either of us quite noticed where the conversation had drifted, we found ourselves laughing together over something small, a story about Renata’s attempts to teach him to make her sauce recipe over the phone, and I hung up afterward feeling something I hadn’t expected to feel again for a long time: the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of talking to my own husband.
I spent the following days going over it again and again, testing the memory of his voice against everything I’d learned about how easily voices could lie, and finding, each time, that the test came back clean, that nothing in how he’d spoken to me matched the careful management I’d once mistaken for honesty.
It didn’t erase what he’d done. It didn’t undo three months of rebuilding a life without him.
But it opened a door I hadn’t been ready to open even a few weeks earlier, and I found myself, for the first time since he’d sent me away, willing to consider what might be waiting on the other side of it.
I hired one of the three consultants Rhodes had sent, a sharp, no-nonsense woman named Frances Odom who’d spent a decade in federal protective services before going independent, and made a point of scheduling the consultation myself, paying her invoice from my own account rather than letting Rhodes’s office handle it.
Frances reviewed the associate’s online comments, cross-referenced them against the broader case file Bram had shared at my request, and delivered her assessment directly to me over the phone rather than through any intermediary.
“Low risk,” she confirmed. “The comments read as venting more than planning. I’d keep an eye on it, but I wouldn’t restructure your life around it.”
“That matches what Bram told me.”
“It should. He’s good at his job. I just wanted you to hear an outside voice confirm it, since I gather that’s been in short supply for you lately.
” Something in her tone suggested she knew more of the story than the bare facts of the case, though she didn’t press for details, and I appreciated the restraint of it.
I called Rhodes that evening to tell him I’d reached the same conclusion Bram’s team had, and instead of any hint of vindication in his voice, I heard only relief, and a small, careful question.
“Does that mean you’re comfortable, at least on this particular issue?”
“I’m comfortable. Thank you for asking rather than assuming.”
“I’m going to keep asking,” he said. “For as long as it takes for asking to feel less remarkable to either of us.”