Chapter 3 - THE UNRAVELING OF JULIAN MORGAN
The following morning, Julian did something he hadn't done in fifteen years. He walked into his walk-in closet, bypassed the rows of bespoke Italian suits, and pulled down a cardboard storage box from the very top shelf—a box he hadn't opened since his third year practicing law.
Inside lay his past: a faded denim jacket, two heavy flannel shirts, a pair of worn canvas hiking boots with salt-stained laces, and a faded college baseball cap from the University of Michigan.
He tried on the flannel shirt. The buttons strained slightly across the chest—he had put on a few pounds of corporate soft living over the years—but it fit.
He spent the afternoon canceling his calendar. He told his senior partners he was taking an indefinite medical leave of absence for exhaustion. No one argued; the scandal of his divorce was already rippling through the legal community like wildfire, and the board was eager to keep the firm's name out of the gossip columns.
By evening, Julian drove his Audi Q7 out of the subterranean garage of the Meridian Tower, leaving the city behind. He didn't take the tollway toward O'Hare or head down to the financial district. He pointed the hood east, toward the endless stretch of I-90 cutting through Indiana and Ohio, heading toward the rugged coast of Maine.
As the Chicago skyline shrank in his rearview mirror, shedding layer after layer of glass, steel, and smog, Julian felt an odd sensation—not liberation, but a terrifying exposure. For the first time in his adult life, he had no schedule, no blackberry buzzing with emergency injunctions, no client demanding his immediate presence, and no mistress waiting for an excuse.
He was entirely alone with his own thoughts. And his thoughts were a gallery of every failure, every missed anniversary, every dismissive glance, and every cold, calculated calculation he had made while his wife sat quietly across the dinner table reading a book by the fireplace.
“In every picture, Claire stood beside me,” he remembered thinking when he looked through the old photo albums. “But I was always looking somewhere else.”
By the second day of driving, the sleek leather interior of the luxury SUV felt suffocating. He turned off the satellite radio, switched off his cell phone entirely, and drove in absolute silence through the rolling hills of New York and the dense pine forests of Massachusetts.
The physical distance between Chicago and the coast of Maine was nearly a thousand miles. But as the miles ticked away on the odometer, Julian felt as though he were traveling backward in time—stripping away the titles, the awards, the prestige, and the armor of his professional arrogance.
By late evening on the third day, the air through the rolled-down car window changed. It carried the crisp, heavy scent of salt spray, wet granite, and decaying autumn leaves.
May you like
He was approaching the rugged coastline of southern Maine.
And the time had finally arrived.
