Chapter 12
Instead, she’d rented a modest apartment near the lake.
The first night there, Emily walked through the living room and stared around.
“You control fifty billion dollars and rented a two-bedroom with squeaky floors.”
“The view is nice.”
“The refrigerator makes a noise like it’s dying.”
“I like character.”
“You need therapy.”
“Probably.”
They laughed until Rachel cried.
Then Rachel really cried.
Not elegantly.
Not for three minutes.
For almost an hour.
Emily sat beside her on the kitchen floor.
Rachel cried for the marriage she’d thought she had.
For the children she and Daniel had discussed but never had because there was always another promotion, another bonus year, another reason to wait.
For the thirty-two-year-old woman she had been when she married him.
For Evelyn.
For herself.
Healing, she discovered, was less cinematic than heartbreak.
It happened in grocery-store aisles.
In empty Sunday mornings.
In realizing she had reached for her phone to text Daniel about something funny.
In deleting his name from emergency contact forms.
In sleeping diagonally across a bed because nobody else needed space.
In learning that peace initially felt suspicious when you’d spent years monitoring someone else’s moods.
Three weeks after the shareholder meeting, she finally opened Daniel’s letter.
Rachel,
I’m writing instead of calling because every time I want to call, I realize I’m asking you to carry one more piece of my emotional weight.
You did that long enough.
I have spent the past month trying to understand how I became a man capable of doing what I did to you.
I could blame Vanessa.
I could blame Pierce.
I could blame my father.
I could blame ambition.
Some of those things influenced me.
None of them made my choices.
I cheated.
May you like
I lied.
I let resentment grow because you owned the house, because you were satisfied with meaningful work while I was terrified that if I stopped climbing, people would discover there was nothing underneath me.
