“I appreciate you saying that,” I told her, and I did, even if it didn’t undo anything.
“For what it’s worth,” Yvette added, “Whitney’s gone. Left town about four days after everything came out. Marcus is a mess. My mother won’t even say her name in the house anymore.”
I didn’t feel triumphant hearing it, the way I might have expected to a year earlier. Mostly I just felt tired, the particular exhaustion of a chapter finally, fully closing after months of holding my breath through it.
Maya started at a small international school on Saint Averil that fall, seven years old and already fluent enough in the island’s easy, musical patois to correct my pronunciation within the first month. Elijah, four, spent most days trailing behind my grandmother’s old gardener, Mr. Osei, learning the names of plants I’d never once bothered to learn myself growing up mainland-side.
I started consulting again that winter, the same interior design work I’d quietly built a client list around during the last two years of my marriage, work Marcus had never once asked a real question about because he’d assumed, without ever checking, that it couldn’t amount to much. It amounted, by that spring, to more contracts than I could comfortably manage alone, enough that I hired my first assistant by summer.
My grandmother Louisa passed peacefully that following winter, ninety-one years old, in the same house she’d left me, surrounded by great-grandchildren she’d gotten two full years with that she never would have had if I’d stayed in Harrow Point pretending a marriage built on quiet contempt was still worth saving.
“Hunger like that never fills up,” she told me once more, near the end, her hand thin and steady in mine. “But you, baby — you built something that does. I’m proud of you for finally letting yourself have it.”
At her funeral, held in the same small church on Saint Averil where she’d been baptized nine decades earlier, Maya stood up unprompted during the family remembrance portion and told the whole congregation, in her careful eight-year-old English mixed with island patois she’d picked up faster than I ever managed, that her great-grandmother had taught her “how to grow tomatoes and how to know when somebody’s lying to you, and both of those things matter the same amount.” The whole church laughed and cried at once, and I understood, watching my daughter stand there so certain of herself, that whatever else Marcus and I had gotten wrong together, we’d at least made two children capable of that kind of clear-eyed honesty.
