Little Secrets(18)

She is enraged. She feels it washing over her like hot wax, coating her outsides, hardening like an armored shell over all the soft, squishy, vulnerable, unprotected places.

She welcomes it. It’s been a long time since she felt anger like this, and she’ll take anger over sadness, any day. For the past four hundred eighty-six days, sadness has knocked her sideways, debilitated her, confused her, made her weak, talked her into settling for things she doesn’t want, and never did.

Rage, on the other hand, will get shit done.





Chapter 6


A strange thing happens when you’re going through something terrible. It’s as if your body and mind separate, and you cease to become a whole person. Your body goes through the motions of what you need to do to survive—eat, sleep, excrete, repeat—while your brain further divides into compartments of Things You Need to Do Now, and Things You Should Process Later When You’re in Your Right Mind.

Marin’s been numb for so long that this spark of anger surprises her. It’s like a limb waking up after falling asleep. The pins-and-needles sensation hurts, kind of, but it also feels good, because it reminds you that you’re alive.

She sends Sadie a text.

Not going to make it in this afternoon. Need some space. Don’t worry, I’m ok.

Sadie responds immediately. She’s probably dying to know what Marin learned at the PI’s office, but she won’t ask—the reassuring “I’m ok” is all she needs for now. Sadie is one of the few people Marin’s allowed herself to trust.

Understood, her GM replies. I’ll clear the decks. Take care of you.

Sadie attaches a picture of her daughter, Abigail, wearing the pink elephant onesie Marin gave her for her first birthday last month. Pictures of Abby always make her smile, and she responds with several heart emojis.

It’s not raining for once, so she rolls down the windows and inhales the fresh spring air. She has the whole day free, but the only thing she wants to do is go home.

The house in Capitol Hill is not exorbitantly large, not a mansion by any means, but it’s stunning, a little over four thousand square feet on a pie-shaped lot. She and Derek bought the house as a fixer-upper in 2009 after the worst of the crash, and took their time renovating it from bottom to top while they continued to live in their tiny two-bedroom house in Queen Anne. The Capitol Hill home is currently worth a hair over five million. The house in Queen Anne—which they kept, and currently rent out—is worth a little over a million. They’ve never talked about selling either, but it’s good to know these things.

She pulls into the driveway and then straight into the garage, entering the house through the mudroom that connects the garage to the kitchen. When Sebastian lived here, the mudroom was always a disaster. Boots, shoes, toys, hoodies, and mittens missing their partners were constantly left scattered all over the floor, even though their son had his own little cubby hole and hook where his things could be stored. The cubby even has his name on it. One of her clients—the same one who knitted him the reindeer sweater—had hand-painted all their names in perfect cursive on small pieces of reclaimed wood as a gift.

“What does it spell, Mommy?” Sebastian had asked when she mounted his on the wall.

She stood back to admire it. “It says your name. Sebastian.”

“The letters look funny.”

“They’re fancy letters.” Marin picked him up and gave him a kiss. “For your fancy spot. This is where you hang your coat and put your things away, okay? Nobody else can put their things here but you.”

The cubby and hook are always neat now. Marin fingers Sebastian’s coat as she enters the mudroom, the same one he was wearing that day at the market, the same one he made her carry because he was too hot from all the walking. His coat and rain boots have never been moved from his cubby, another thing her therapist suggested she might want to consider changing.

“Of course, you don’t have to get rid of anything, Marin,” Dr. Chen had said, a couple of months back. He’d spoken softly, kindly. “But it would be an act of self-care for you to choose not to keep his things where you see them all the time. Perhaps you could move his coat and boots to his bedroom. That way you can still go in and see them whenever you like, rather than be confronted with them every single time you enter the house.”

“It’s not a confrontation,” Marin insisted, feeling both frustrated and stubborn. That was about the time she began to suspect that she might want to be done with therapy. “There are gaping holes in all the places my son used to be, and I have no desire to relocate them somewhere else.”

She doesn’t understand why everybody keeps trying to get her to move forward, when all she wants to do is stay still.

Marin kicks her shoes off and enters the kitchen, which smells fresh and clean. When Sebastian was home, she would cook all the time. She doesn’t cook much anymore, and with Derek gone for days at a time, there’s now no need. She misses the comfortable mess of their family life. Even with a cleaning lady scheduled every week, it had never stayed pristine for long. Evidence of Sebastian’s existence would be everywhere, at all times. Cracker crumbs on the kitchen floor underneath the table. Milk stains on the kitchen chairs. Lego pieces and Hot Wheels cars on the staircase. A sock with no twin buried in the couch cushions. Over the past year, those things have been tidied—not all at once, but gradually, as they’ve been discovered—and there is no Sebastian here anymore to mess everything up again. Which is why nobody’s allowed to touch his mudroom cubby, or his bedroom. Daniela still comes every Friday, but now she’s in and out in record time.