Chapter 4 - What He Called Taking Care of Me
I read the agreement with a strange, detached curiosity.
There were dates.
Amounts.
An itemized list of living expenses covering the fourteen months since I had left my firm.
Rent contribution.
Health insurance.
Groceries.
A professional development allowance.
That last entry made me laugh once, harshly enough to hurt my lip.
The allowance was a lighting conference Evan had encouraged me to attend before deciding that the hotel was too expensive and asking me to cancel.
He had included the registration fee anyway.
“Did you know about this?” Audrey asked.
“He said we had a few financial things to sign before the ceremony.”
“Did he say you owed him money?”
“No.”
I remembered him kissing my forehead when I resigned.
You can breathe now, he had said.
Let me take care of you.
Mara reviewed the document that evening. She told me not to sign anything and asked for the related messages, statements, and emails.
I wanted her to call it fraud immediately.
Instead, she said, “We need to establish what happened.”
Her restraint steadied me more than outrage would have.
I could work with facts.
For years, I had turned buildings into drawings, measurements, electrical loads, and lighting plans. I knew how to find a problem once I stopped pretending it was normal.
The next morning, Lydia met us in a private room at Mara’s office.
She looked nothing like the rival I had carried in my imagination.
She wore jeans, a green sweater, and rain-darkened boots. There were faint lines around her eyes. Her hair was shorter than mine.
We stared at each other for an awkward second.
Then she said, “I’m so sorry.”
I began crying before I could answer.
She waited until I sat down.
On the table, she placed a folder containing photographs of her grandmother’s house, a scanned copy of the letter she had sent me, and emails she had exchanged with Evan after their breakup.
The first email was twelve years old.
Please leave my sister alone. She does not know where I am.
I looked at her.
“He contacted your family?”
“He said he needed closure.”
The next message was from Vivian.
Evan has an important future. I hope you will not confuse a difficult separation with something more serious.
My skin went cold.
Lydia handed me the copy of her letter.
It began simply.
Sloane, you do not know me, and I understand why you may not want to hear from me.
She had written about the camera he smashed when she accepted a summer program out of state. She had described the apologies, the gifts, the pressure to stop seeing friends who disliked him.
Near the bottom, one sentence caught me.
If he tells you that you are the only person who can keep him calm, please remember that I was once the only person too.
I read it again.
Then I covered my face.
Audrey sat beside me while Lydia looked down at her folded hands.
“I thought he loved you,” I finally said.
“He may believe he did.”
“He kept the painting like it was sacred.”
“It belonged to a time when he thought I would stay.”
Mara asked Lydia whether she would be willing to provide a written account of her own experiences. Lydia said yes, but made clear that some dates were approximate.
Nobody tried to make the stories fit perfectly.
That mattered to me.
Afterward, in the parking lot, Lydia took a photograph from her folder.
It showed a little white house beside a lake. A blue canoe rested upside down near the porch.
“My grandmother used to let us paint on the steps,” she said. “She didn’t care how much we spilled.”
For the first time, I imagined the painting somewhere outside Evan’s office.
On a sister’s wall.
Above a kitchen table.
Belonging to an ordinary family.
“I’m sorry I damaged the frame,” I said.
Lydia shook her head.
“I’m glad you got out.”
That evening, my former manager, Nora Chen, called.
I almost ignored it.
I had told her, fourteen months earlier, that I was leaving because the work no longer interested me.
The lie had embarrassed me ever since.
Audrey watched the screen.
“You can answer.”
Nora’s voice was careful.
“I heard the wedding was canceled. I don’t need details. I wanted to know whether you’re all right.”
“No,” I said.
There was a pause.
“Okay. Then we start there.”
She offered me a small freelance assignment, one I could do from Audrey’s dining table.
After we hung up, an email arrived from Evan.
The subject line read: Before You Destroy Both Our Lives.
Attached was a screenshot of a message I had sent him months earlier.
May you like
I’m sorry. It was my fault.
For the first time, I wondered how many of my apologies he had saved.
