Where Would You Go

"Say that again."

Grant's voice had dropped low and flat. He was staring at the ring on the folder as if it had bitten him.

"I want a divorce," Mara said.

"You can't be serious." He laughed, short and ugly. "Mom, did you hear this?"

"I heard." Lorraine's hand had closed around the lapel of her robe. "She's having a tantrum. Give her until lunch."

"I'm not having a tantrum." Mara stepped around the glass on the tile and walked past them, out of the kitchen.

Grant caught up in the hall. "Where do you think you're going?"

"To get my passport."

"Your passport." He followed her into the study.

"Mara, look at me. Look at me! Where would you go? Your parents are dead. You have no siblings.

Your only friend is a nurse who works nights. You have a job where you count boxes." He spread his hands. "You have me. That's all you have."

She pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk and lifted out the blue booklet. Beneath it lay her birth certificate, her degree, and an old savings book from when she was nineteen. She slid them into her laptop bag one at a time. Her wedding photo watched from the shelf, the two of them squinting into someone else's sun. She did not look at it.

"You hear what I'm saying?" His voice climbed. "I carried you. Seven years I put up with you, and you stand in my house and throw a ring at me?"

"I set it down. I didn't throw it."

"Don't correct me!"

Lorraine had followed them to the study door.

"Think of what people will say," she hissed. "My son's wife, walking out with a bag like a thief. The neighbors will talk for a year."

"Let them."

Grant's voice dropped, suddenly soft, the voice he used to use on bad days. "Babe. I love you. You know that. Whatever's going on in your head, we can fix it. Just put the bag down."

She almost laughed. She had waited seven years to hear him say it, and now it sounded like a man reading a menu.

The sharpness of it made the framed photographs on the shelf rattle. Mara zipped the bag shut and slung it over her shoulder. Her hands were steady. In the last life that same shout would have had her apologizing before he finished the sentence.

She headed for the front door.

Grant got there first. He planted himself in front of it and pressed one palm flat against the wood.

"You're not leaving this house until you calm down."

"Move."

"Or what?"

She looked at his hand on the door. Then at his face, flushed and tight around the mouth. There was no worry in it, no hurt. He looked like a man whose wallet had been snatched on a crowded street.

"Or I call the police," she said. "And when they ask why I'm calling, I'll tell them about eighty-two thousand dollars and a design retainer for a woman named Pierce. Your mother can explain the budget to them."

Behind her, Lorraine's slippers stopped on the marble.

Grant's hand came off the door.

Mara opened it. Warm August air rolled in, smelling of cut grass and car exhaust. A sprinkler ticked across the lawn next door. Everything was bright and ordinary and enormously alive.

"You'll be back by dinner," Grant called after her.

His voice cracked on the last word. "You hear me? You have nowhere to go!"

She walked down the driveway and did not turn around.

Halfway down the block her knees started to shake. She kept walking until she reached the corner, then pressed her back against a brick wall and breathed. In. Out. A boy rode past on a bike, ringing his bell. She wanted to grab his handlebars and tell him to go home, go up high, go now. She let him ride away.

Her phone rang. The name on the screen read Aunt Dina.

Mara let it ring four times. Then she answered.

"Mara, sweetheart." The voice was warm, rich, practiced. It had been the sound of every Sunday call for twenty years. "Lorraine just phoned me.

She says you've had some sort of episode."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine, darling, you're upset. Marriages go through these seasons." A soft laugh. "Not every man will put up with a wife like you, you know.

Grant is patient. Go home. Apologize to his mother. We'll all forget this by Sunday."

Mara stopped under a jacaranda tree. Purple blossoms lay crushed on the pavement.

"Aunt Dina, did Grandpa leave me anything?"

The line went quiet.

It lasted maybe two seconds. In the last life, Mara would never have noticed it.

"Leave you anything?" Dina's laugh came back, a little too bright. "Whatever gave you that idea? He left the farm to his lawyers and the debts to us.

You know that. Why are you asking?"

"No reason."

"Mara. Listen to me." The warmth thinned. "You are tired and emotional and you are making a mistake. Go home. That's an order from someone who loves you."

"Goodbye, Aunt Dina."

She ended the call. Her thumb hovered over the screen. Then she typed a message to the one person who had never asked her for anything.

Dani, I'm leaving Grant. Today. Can I call you after your shift?

The reply came before she had pocketed the phone. Finally. Call me whenever. I'll have my phone on the whole night.

Mara read it twice. Something in her chest, held shut for seven years, loosened by one small notch. Then she turned the phone off completely.

An envelope drifting past her face in black water.

A blue letterhead, soaked and blurred, with a name she had seen only once.

Whitlock & Reyes, Attorneys at Law.

The firm was fourteen floors up in a glass tower downtown. Mara rode the bus for forty minutes with her bag clutched against her stomach, watching the city slide past the window. A flower stall. A coffee queue. A woman scolding a toddler over a dropped ice cream. A man in a suit laughing into his phone. Not one of them looked at the sky. An old man across the aisle held out a packet of tissues without a word, and she realized she had been crying silently since the second stop. She thanked him and wiped her face. What came up under the tears was not sadness. It was something cold and clean, and she liked it.

She wondered how many of them would be alive on October 14. She made herself stop wondering.

The elevator was glass, too, and rose through the building like a bubble in a bottle. In the reflection a tired young woman stared back, hair coming loose, a laptop bag hugged to her ribs, and a cracked green bracelet on a thin wrist. She looked like someone who had run away from home. She stood up straighter anyway.

The lobby on fourteen was white marble and silence. A young woman with a headset looked up from the reception desk with a professional smile.

"Good morning. Do you have an appointment?"

"No." Mara set her hands on the cool stone. "My name is Mara Ellison. I need to speak with someone about my family."

"I'm sorry, we only see clients by..."

The woman's eyes dropped to the screen. Her fingers stopped on the keys.

"Ellison," she said slowly. "Ellison, as in the Ellison Trust?"

Mara's pulse beat once, hard, in the cracked jade at her wrist.

"I think so," she said.

The receptionist rose so quickly her chair rolled backward and hit the wall. "Please wait here.

Please. Don't go anywhere."

She vanished down a corridor. Mara heard a door open, a low voice, a louder one, and then rapid footsteps.

A gray-haired man in his sixties came around the corner with his jacket half buttoned. He stopped three feet from her and took off his glasses, then put them on again, as if his eyes might be playing a trick.

"Miss Ellison," he said. "Edmund Whitlock. I handled your grandfather's estate."

"Mr. Whitlock."

"We have written to you eleven times." His voice shook slightly. "Eleven letters in three years. Your aunt told us you refused every one. She said you wanted nothing to do with the family business."

Mara felt the cold settle into her spine like water finding its level.

"I never received a single letter," she said.

Whitlock looked at her for a long moment.

"No," he said quietly. "I rather thought you hadn't."

He pushed open the glass door of his office and held it for her.

"Please come in, Miss Ellison. Your grandfather left you far more than a farm."