Chapter seven

Seth opened the door before I finished knocking.

He took one look at me standing on his doorstep with my bag and my ruined mascara and the particular expression of someone who has just walked out of a war they'd been losing for three years, and he stepped aside without a word. No questions, no careful arrangement of his face into something sympathetic, no performance of concern. That was the thing about Seth that I had always taken for granted and only now understood was rare. He had never once in fifteen years asked me to explain myself before he let me in.

I made it as far as his kitchen. I set my bag on the table and stood there with both hands flat against the surface and my eyes fixed on the grain of the wood and tried very hard to hold onto the steadiness I had maintained for the past forty minutes. The drive over. The dark streets. The way I had kept my breathing even and my hands on the wheel and not let myself think about any of it until I was somewhere safe.

I didn't manage it.

It came out of me the way things do when you've been holding them too long, not gradually but all at once, a single ragged breath that broke open into several, that became something I hadn't allowed myself in three years of a marriage that had required me to be smaller and quieter and more grateful than I was. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't the quiet dignified grief of someone who has things under control. It was the ugly, exhausted kind that comes from a body that has simply run out of places to put things.

Seth put his arms around me and didn't say anything at all.

I cried until I was empty. It took longer than I expected.

At some point we had ended up on the kitchen floor with our backs against the cabinet doors, the way we used to sit in high school when the world felt too large for the rooms we were in. He handed me water when I needed it. He didn't offer perspective or silver linings or the reassurances people reach for because silence makes them uncomfortable. He just stayed, which was the only thing I needed and the thing I had not had in a very long time.

By the time the windows began going pale with early light I had stopped crying. I sat with my knees pulled up and my back against the cabinet and noticed that something had changed, not dramatically, not the way things change in stories, but quietly. A door closing from the inside. A decision settling into place without needing to be announced.

"I'm leaving the country," I said.

Seth turned his head to look at me. "Okay."

"I need to be gone before he thinks to look. Before anyone does. I need distance and I need time and I need to be somewhere no one knows my name."

"I know what you mean." He was quiet for a moment. "I'm coming with you."

"Seth—"

"I have a lease ending next month. I work remotely. I have a bag I never fully unpacked from the last time I moved." He said it the way he said most things, evenly, as though the decision had already been made and he was simply informing me of the relevant facts. "So. Where are we going?"

We sat on his kitchen floor and built a plan as the city woke up outside. It was a practical exercise, deliberately so, because practicality was the only register either of us could manage at five in the morning after the night we'd had. Money, documents, what could be liquidated quickly and what couldn't be replaced. Travel routes. The medical care I would need over the coming months. What the next year would require if I was going to do this properly and not just run and fall apart somewhere unfamiliar.

We didn't talk about what it meant. There would be time for meaning later, in some other city, when there was enough distance to think clearly about any of it.

At half past six I used Seth's laptop.

The first document I printed was medical. Clinical language, correct letterhead, a procedure recorded in careful administrative detail that had not in fact taken place. Seth had made a call the night before, quietly and without explaining more than was necessary, to someone who owed him more than a favor and who understood that some things are better left undocumented. I read the form twice. I felt nothing about what it was, only about what it would accomplish, which was to close the one door that might otherwise give Darius a reason to come after me. Let him believe I had complied. Let him think he had won that too. It cost me nothing to give him that, because it wasn't real, and I was done spending real things on him.

The second document was the divorce papers. I had signed them in a parking lot under a street light on the way over, the pen moving steadily across every line, every page, because I had already made that decision in the hallway of my own house when I looked at him and saw nothing worth fighting for. I didn't cry while signing them. That had surprised me. I thought I would.

I drove back to the house alone. Seth offered to come. I told him no, because some things need to be done by the person they belong to, and this was mine.

The street was empty. The house was dark, every window unlit, the same facade it had always presented to the world, clean and large and giving nothing away.

I walked to the front door and crouched down. I slid the fake medical form through the mail slot and heard it land softly on the other side. Then I took the divorce papers and fed them under the gap at the bottom of the door, heard them whisper across the hardwood of the foyer, traveling further into the house than I would ever go again.

I stood up. I looked at the house for a moment. Just looked at it, the dark glass and the stone steps and the life I had tried, genuinely and completely, to build inside its walls.

Then I walked back to my car, started the engine, and drove toward whatever came next.