Half a year for myself

I went upstairs after breakfast and closed the bedroom door behind me. For eight years I had waited in that room for someone to knock, someone to apologize, someone to come and say that they had made a mistake. This time I did not wait for anything. I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the house go on without me, the clatter of dishes, the murmur of the maids, Serena laughing somewhere below.

Lucian had told me he did not care if I died. Mia had told me she did not want me either. Madam Hart had only turned a page of her newspaper. Three people, one answer, and I had heard every word of it with my own ears.

I thought about the doctor, and the calm way she had said six months. I had walked out of her office thinking I had no time left, but sitting there I finally understood the truth of it. I had plenty of time. I had simply been spending it in the wrong place, on the wrong people, begging for something they had never intended to give me.

If I stayed, I would spend every remaining day exactly the same way. I would sit at the far end of that table and eat cold food. I would listen to Madam Hart call me useless, and I would watch my own daughter grow more distant, and I would die in this house still hoping. The thought made my stomach turn, and then, strangely, it made me stand up.

I did not want to die like that. I did not want my last months to be another eight years in miniature.

I pulled the old suitcase down from the wardrobe and laid it open on the bed. My hands were steady, which surprised me. I folded my clothes with the same care I had once used to fold them for a honeymoon, only now there was no husband waiting downstairs and no future I was pretending to believe in. I took only what belonged to me and left the rest.

When I zipped the case shut, the sound was small and final. I stood in the middle of the room and looked around at the bed I had slept in alone, the window I had stared out of on a thousand empty afternoons, and the door I had closed so many times to cry where no one could hear. I thought I would feel sad. Instead I felt light, like a woman stepping out of a coat that had been too heavy for years.

I would leave this house. I would live whatever time I had left for myself, and I would not ask anyone to love me for it.

I carried the suitcase down the stairs, and nobody stopped me. Serena and Mia were in the drawing room with a picture book open between them, and my daughter did not look up as I passed the doorway. I paused there for one moment, my fingers tight around the handle, and let myself look at her. She leaned against Serena, calm and content, and I told myself that this was what she wanted. I could not make her want anything else.

I whispered goodbye so softly that not even the floor heard it. Then I walked to the front door, pulled it open, and stepped out into the cool evening air.

The gravel crunched under my shoes as I crossed the drive. I put my suitcase in the trunk of my little gray car and got behind the wheel. My hands rested on the leather for a second, trembling now that there was no one left to see them, and then I turned the key.

The gates opened slowly. I drove through them and did not look in the mirror.

For the first few minutes, the road felt endless and beautiful. Tall trees lined both sides, and the last of the daylight slipped through their branches in long gold streaks. The radio was playing something quiet that I did not recognize. I loosened my grip on the wheel and breathed out, and the breath came all the way from the bottom of my chest, deeper than any I had taken in years.

I was crying, but I was also smiling, which made no sense at all. Every mile that passed felt like another weight sliding off my shoulders. I thought of the diagnosis, and for the first time it did not feel like a sentence. It felt like a door that had finally opened, and I was walking toward the light on the other side of it, whatever that light turned out to be.

I laughed, a small, shaky sound, and wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand as the road curved down the hill.

That was when the headlights came.

They burst out of the dusk from the wrong side of the road, enormous and white and impossibly fast. For one suspended second I could see nothing else in the world. I heard my own scream, and I felt my hands wrench the wheel, and the tires shrieked against the asphalt as the whole car slid sideways.

Then came the crash, a great tearing roar of metal and glass that seemed to swallow the sky. My body slammed against the door, and the world turned over once, slowly, like a coin thrown into the air. Something warm ran down the side of my face. The last thing I heard was the faint, distant sound of the radio, still playing its quiet song, and then even that was gone.