Chapter Thirteen
I stayed with Nadine for what turned into eight nights. Our house hadn't become unbearable. I simply needed somewhere to be that didn't have fifteen years of furniture arranged around a story I no longer entirely believed.
"You don't have to explain yourself to me," Nadine said, the first night, handing me a glass of wine I mostly didn't drink. "Stay as long as you need. I'll even stop asking when you're going back, if that helps."
"It helps," I said, sitting on her couch with my knees pulled up like I was twenty-two again, back in the apartment we'd shared before either of us had husbands or businesses or fifteen-year histories to untangle.
"I keep waiting to feel angrier," I admitted, that first night. "Everyone would understand if I were furious. I am furious, some hours. But mostly I just feel strange. Unmoored."
"Because you still love him."
"Because I still love him," I agreed. "That's the part nobody warns you about.
It would almost be easier if I hated him right now.
I don't. I miss him in this stupid, ordinary way, missing the sound of him coming in the door, and at the same time I can't sit in a room with him without thinking about that interview. "
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is," I admitted. "I keep waiting for my feelings to organize themselves into something coherent, and they just don't. I love him and I'm furious with him and I miss him and I don't trust him, all at the same time, all day long, and none of those feelings seem to cancel any of the others out."
"Maybe they're not supposed to," Nadine said. "Maybe that's just what it actually feels like, underneath all the neat stories people tell about heartbreak. Messy and contradictory and none of it resolving into a clean verdict."
"Do you think stray thread makes something a mess, or does it just mean the weave is more complicated than it looks?" I asked, only half joking, already reaching for the language of the class before I'd even properly started it.
"I like that framing better," Nadine said. "Complicated instead of messy. Give yourself that grace, at least."
"Do you think he understands what he did?"
"I think he's starting to," I said. "I don't think he understood it before.
I genuinely don't think Christian is a man who set out to erase me from our own history.
I think he built a story about himself because that's the story everyone kept telling him, the reporters, the board, Damon, and somewhere along the way he stopped noticing there was a whole other person standing next to him the entire time. "
"That doesn't make it hurt less."
"No," I said. "It doesn't."
Nadine's apartment had a small guest room that had once been her home office, and she'd cleared a corner of it for me without making a production of the gesture, just moved a stack of files off the daybed and left a spare set of towels folded on the dresser, the kind of quiet practical care that asked nothing of me in return.
I lay awake that first night listening to the unfamiliar sounds of her building, a different creak in the floorboards, a different rhythm of traffic outside the window, and found myself, despite everything, oddly comforted by the strangeness of it, a life temporarily stripped down to almost nothing, no calendar to manage, no dinner to plan, no one's needs but my own to consider.
Over the following days, a rhythm settled between us that felt, in its own way, like a small return to something I hadn't known I'd missed.
Nadine went to work each morning, and I found myself, for the first time in longer than I could remember, with hours that belonged to nobody but me.
The first morning I didn't know what to do with myself, and spent most of it wandering her apartment, straightening things that didn't need straightening, an old habit refusing to switch off just because its usual target was absent.
By the third morning, I'd started walking.
Nothing dramatic, just a loop through the park near Nadine's building, but I noticed, on that walk, how strange it felt to move through a morning with no one's schedule to check, no coffee to time, no calendar syncing quietly in the background of my attention.
I found I didn't entirely like the silence at first. It felt less like freedom than like an absence, a hole where something used to be.
Christian texted twice that week, careful, undemanding messages that asked nothing of me beyond acknowledgment.
Hope you're doing okay. No need to respond, just thinking of you.
I didn't always respond, and he never pushed, and something in that restraint surprised me more than an apology would have.
The old Christian, or the Christian of the last several years anyway, would have called, would have wanted resolution on a timeline that suited him. This Christian let the silence sit.
I talked to Nadine, one evening over dinner, about a strange instinct I kept noticing in myself, something almost embarrassing to admit out loud.
"I keep almost texting him things," I said. "Small things. Reminders. His mother mentioned wanting to see a specific movie, and I nearly texted him to buy tickets before I caught myself. It's like a phantom limb. The managing doesn't just stop because I moved out for a week."
"Do you text him?"
"I didn't, that time. I let it go. I think that's actually harder than being angry. Being angry is loud. This is just this constant, quiet pull back toward doing the thing I've always done, and having to consciously decide not to, over and over, all day."
"What happens if you just let yourself do it? Just once?"
"Then I'm right back where I started," I said. "I don't think this works if I keep doing his life's maintenance from a guest bedroom four miles away. The whole point is finding out what's left of me when I'm not doing it."
Nadine reached over and squeezed my hand. "For what it's worth, I like what's left of you quite a bit."
I found an evening class at the community college that week, textile arts, meeting twice a week, nothing dramatic, nothing that would generate headlines of its own.
I signed up for it sitting at Nadine's kitchen table with my laptop, and I didn't tell Christian.
I wasn't hiding it. It simply felt, for the first time in a long time, like something that belonged only to me, and I wanted to keep it that way for a little while longer before I let it become part of our shared story again.
The first night of class, I sat near the back, feeling absurdly out of place among a mix of retirees and college students, most of them a decade younger or older than me and none of them, as far as I could tell, in the middle of quietly dismantling a fifteen-year marriage.
The instructor had us start with something simple, a basic plain weave on a small tabletop loom, and I fumbled with the shuttle for the first twenty minutes, my hands having forgotten more than I expected.
By the end of the class, though, something in my fingers remembered, some old muscle memory surfacing through the rust, and I left that first night with a small, uneven swatch of fabric that I held onto in the car for a long time before I made myself put it down and drive back to Nadine's.
I called my mother that week, something I don't do often enough, and found myself telling her, without quite meaning to, more of the truth than I'd planned.
"He said what?" my mother said, her voice sharpening in the particular way it does when she's about to become fiercely protective. "After everything you gave up for that company?"
"Mom, I don't want you to hate him. I still love him. I just needed to say it out loud to someone who isn't Nadine, because Nadine's heard it eleven times already and I think she's starting to feel it more than she should have to."
"I don't hate him," my mother said, more gently.
"I remember how hard those years were for both of you.
I also remember driving up once, when you were maybe six months into that apartment over the dry cleaner, and finding you asleep at the kitchen table with a stack of invoices under your cheek.
You'd fallen asleep working, Isla. You were twenty-six years old. "
"I remember that visit," I said, surprised she did too.
"I've thought about it over the years," my mother admitted.
"I always wondered if I should have said something then, told you that you were giving too much of yourself away.
I didn't, because you seemed happy, in your own exhausted way, and because I didn't think it was my place to tell a grown woman how to run her own marriage. "
"I was happy," I said. "That's the strange part. I don't look back on that year and see only sacrifice. I see us, young and terrified and completely devoted to each other. I don't regret any of it."
"I know you don't," my mother said. "I'm not asking you to. I just want you to know that some of us saw what it cost, even when you never once said so yourself."
I found, going through the box of my grandmother's things one more time before I left it at Nadine's for safekeeping, an old sketchbook near the bottom, water-stained on one corner, full of textile patterns I'd drawn in my early twenties, before Christian, before the company, before any of it.
I hadn't looked at it in over a decade. Some of the designs were embarrassing, the work of someone still finding her hand.
Some of them, looking at them now with fifteen years of distance, were genuinely good.
"What if he doesn't change," Nadine asked, near the end of that week, careful the way she always is when she's about to say something I might not want to hear. "What if this is just who he is now, and the guilt fades, and things go back to exactly how they were?"
"Then I'll know," I said. "That's the whole point of the space. I need to actually see what he does, not what he says. He's very good at saying the right thing. I need to watch him do the harder thing instead."
"And if he doesn't?"
"Then I'll have this," I said, gesturing vaguely at the sketchbook, at the quiet mornings, at the version of myself I was slowly, carefully starting to remember how to be. "I'll have found this again either way. That part isn't conditional on him anymore."
Before I fell asleep that last night at Nadine's, I opened the sketchbook one more time, all the way to the back page, where I'd once sketched a rough plan for what I imagined my studio might look like someday, a floor plan for a space I'd never actually rented, shelves labeled in a careful, hopeful hand for materials I'd never gotten the chance to buy.
Twenty-two-year-old me had been so certain, sketching that room, that it was only a matter of time.
I traced the lines of that old drawing with my finger, feeling less grief than I expected and more of something like recognition, a promise made by a younger version of myself that I was, perhaps for the first time in years, actually in a position to consider keeping.