Chapter 12

Chapter 12

LINA

The study was the quietest room in the house.

Damien used it occasionally, late evenings when he brought work home, but during the day it sat empty and undisturbed, the way most rooms in this house did, maintained and purposeless. It had a large desk, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined with volumes that had been arranged by a designer rather than read by anyone, and a desktop computer that I had used exactly twice in two years, once to print a document for one of the charitable foundation events and once when my laptop charger had broken and I needed to look something up quickly.

It was the desktop I was thinking about now.

My phone was traceable in ways I did not fully understand but was not willing to risk. I knew that Damien's household manager, a quiet efficient woman named Mrs. Park who handled the administrative architecture of our lives, had set up some kind of shared network when I first moved in. I didn't know exactly what that meant in practical terms, whether searches could be seen, whether there was any monitoring, whether I was being paranoid or not paranoid enough. I suspected the latter.

The desktop in the study was not connected to my accounts. It was simply a computer in a room that nobody used during the day.

I waited until Damien had been gone for forty minutes the first morning, long enough that I could be certain he hadn't forgotten anything and come back, and then I went into the study, closed the door, and sat down.

The chair was too high for me and I lowered it. Then I looked at the screen for a moment, gathering myself, and opened the browser.

I had given myself an hour. I was going to use every minute of it.

The first thing I did was create a new email address. I chose a provider I did not usually use, created an account under S. Rodriguez, gave it a recovery option connected to nothing in my current life, and wrote the password on a piece of paper that I folded into my wallet behind my old student ID where it would look like nothing if anyone happened to see it. Then I opened a new tab and began to search.

Communications roles. Mid-sized organisations. Entry level and one step above it. Not the large corporations whose HR departments would do thorough background checks and whose social media teams would certainly recognize the name if it occurred to them to search the wife of and Whitmore in the same breath. Not anything that intersected with his world, his industries, his social connections. Something separate. Something that belonged entirely to the world I had existed in before this house.

There were more options than I had expected. I had spent two years feeling like I had drifted outside the current of ordinary life and would need some complicated process to re-enter it, but looking at the listings on the screen, they were simply jobs, described in plain language, asking for qualifications I possessed, offering salaries I could survive on if I was careful.

I found the nonprofit listing on the third page of results, which was either a sign that it was slightly obscure or simply that their advertising budget was modest. A communications coordinator role at an organisation called the Ryland Foundation, which did housing advocacy work. The description asked for someone with strong writing skills, experience managing external communications, and the ability to work independently on multiple projects with light supervision. The salary was not generous but it was liveable, and more importantly it was located in a part of the city that had no overlap with any address I associated with Damien's life.

I read the description three times.

Then I opened a new document, and I began to write my CV.

It had been two years since I had written one and I was aware of the gap, the silent two years that would sit in any timeline and require explanation. I thought about it carefully. The charitable foundation work was real and documentable, I had written grant communications, managed donor correspondence, drafted event materials, and the woman who ran it, Clara Osei, had told me more than once that my work was excellent. I listed it. I listed my degree. I listed the tutoring work I had done through university. I listed a content writing job I had held for eight months before the wedding, a small digital publication that probably no longer existed but whose editor had given me a glowing written reference that I still had in the envelope with my documents.

Under name, I typed Selina Rodriguez.

I looked at it for a moment. It felt strange and entirely right at the same time, like putting on a coat you had left in storage and finding it still fit.

I spent the remainder of the hour writing the cover letter. I wrote four drafts. The first was too formal, stiff in the way writing becomes when you are anxious. The second overcorrected into something that felt too eager. The third was closer but buried the strongest material in the second paragraph, which I knew from my own experience of reading donor letters was where attention began to drift. The fourth version led with the thing I was most confident about, my ability to make complicated information legible to people who weren't specialists, which was the core of what housing advocacy communications required, and built outward from there.

I read it back once. Then I submitted the application, cleared the browser history, lowered the brightness on the monitor back to where it had been, adjusted the chair height, and left the study exactly as I had found it.

I stood in the hallway outside the closed door and breathed.

It was done. It was a small thing, a CV and a cover letter sent into the digital air, and it might come to nothing, but it was the first forward motion I had made in a very long time and it felt like something moving in my chest that I hadn't known was stuck.

I went to the kitchen and made tea. My hands were steady.