Chapter Four: The Last Humiliation

POV: Roza

I gave myself two days.

Two days to move through the house carefully, taking only what was mine, the clothes, the books with my name written in the front covers, the small framed photograph of my parents that had lived on the guest room shelf because Callum had not wanted it anywhere more visible. Two days to do it quietly and thoroughly and without leaving a single thing behind that I would one day need to come back for.

I should have been faster.

Gemma arrived on the second morning with a key.

I heard the front door before I heard her. The specific sound of someone entering a house they consider theirs, no knock, no pause, just the turn of a lock and the swing of a door. I came out of the bedroom and looked down the stairs and she was in the hallway below, unwinding a cashmere scarf from her neck and hanging it on the hook where my coat had lived for seven years. She looked up when she heard me.

"Morning," she said. "Callum said you were still sorting your things. Take your time."

She walked into the kitchen.

I stood at the top of the stairs and breathed, slowly, through my nose, four counts in and four counts out, the way I had learned to manage the moments in this marriage that threatened to come out of me wrong.

Then I went back into the bedroom and packed faster.

She was in the sitting room when I came down with the second bag, both bags by the door, my coat on, my passport in my inside pocket next to the folded train ticket. She had made herself tea. She was standing at the window that looked out over the garden, the one I had loved in summer when the wisteria came in, holding the mug in both hands and looking at the room with the measured, proprietary gaze of someone deciding what to change.

She turned when she heard me set the bag down.

"I always loved this room," she said. "The afternoon light is extraordinary."

"Yes," I said. "It is."

"I think I will change the curtains." She tilted her head, studying the fabric. "They are very you, A bit heavy,A bit much."

I picked up the nearest bag.

"Twelve years," I said. I was not shouting. My voice was very quiet and I kept it that way on purpose. "Twelve years you sat in my kitchen and cried on my sofa and called me at eleven o'clock at night when things went wrong. For twelve years I answered every time." I looked at her properly, at the careful blankness of her face, at the hand resting on her still-flat stomach. "And you have nothing. Not one thing to say to me."

"I have quite a lot to say," she said. "I am simply choosing not to, because I do not think it will help either of us." She sipped her tea. "You were never right for him, Roza. You know that. You are too soft. Too eager. You needed things from him that he was never going to give, and the harder you tried the more it pushed him away. Men like Callum are not attracted to need. They never are."

"And you think he will be different with you."

"I know he will." No hesitation. No flicker of doubt. "Because I do not need him to love me to survive. I never have. And that is the difference."

I picked up the second bag.

"Congratulations on the pregnancy," I said.

"Roza." Her voice stopped me at the sitting room door. I turned. She set down the mug and looked at me with something that was almost, almost compassion, a pale version of it, the kind that costs nothing. "He told me things. About the marriage. I want you to know that." She folded her hands. "He said you cried after he turned away from you at night. 

That it made him feel terrible but there was nothing he could do, because some women simply do not inspire that response in a man. That the weight, the neediness, all of it made him feel trapped." She paused. "He said he was ashamed at every event you attended together. That he used to dread walking into a room with you."

The room was very still.

"I am telling you this," she said, "not to hurt you. But because I think you have been living in a version of this marriage that was never real, and you deserve to leave with the truth."

"Thank you," I said. "For the truth."

I walked out of the sitting room. I picked up both bags from the hall and opened the front door. The October air hit my face, cold and damp and smelling of the neighbour's burning leaves, and I stepped out onto the front path.

"Roza."

Callum's voice. Behind me. I turned and he was standing at the gate, still in last night's suit, slightly rumpled, hair not quite right, and for one disorienting moment he looked almost human, almost like the man I had married who had occasionally, briefly, looked at me as though I might matter.

"The solicitor needs a forwarding address," he said.

A black car turned into the street behind him. Helena Vane stepped out in a camel coat, elegant and assembled, his mother who had told me on my wedding day, quietly, over champagne, that she hoped I understood what was expected of a Vane wife. She looked at me. She looked at the bags in my hands. She sighed, not unkindly, which was the Helena Vane version of contempt.

"Rosalind," she said. "I think we always knew this was how it would end. Didn't we?"

Callum said nothing.

I looked at him one last time, at the house behind him, at the lit window where I could see Gemma's silhouette, and I thought about the cake on the kitchen counter with its seven unlit candles, and the bathroom floor, and the tile under my back four years ago while the shower ran cold, and every small burial I had performed in this marriage, every piece of myself I had quietly put in the ground.

"My solicitor's address will do," I said to Callum. "You can send everything there."

I turned and walked to the end of the street.

I did not look back, Not once. Not even when I heard Helena say something to Callum in a low voice, not even when the front door of the house opened and closed again. I walked to the bus stop on the main road and I sat down on the bench and I put both bags at my feet and I cried, silently, with my chin up and my eyes open, letting the cold air dry it as fast as it came.

Not for Callum.

For the girl who had walked into that house seven years ago and spent every day since trying to be enough for someone who had already decided she was not.

She deserved that much, at least. A minute on a bench. A proper goodbye.

Then I picked up my bags. I got on the bus. I did not look out of the window as we passed the street.