Chapter 15
I finally read Clara’s old journal.
Not hidden.
I simply had avoided it after her death.
She wrote about our marriage.
Love.
Anger.
My absences.
Her frustration.
Plans to spend a month with her sister.
Nothing about leaving forever.
Nothing about taking Noah from me.
Marcus had been right about one thing.
She needed space.
I had been wrong to fear that as betrayal.
Perhaps if she had lived, our marriage would have changed.
Maybe ended.
Maybe survived.
I would never know.
That uncertainty once terrified me.
Now I accepted it.
Because pretending she would definitely have stayed was another way of stealing her future choices.
Clara had been more than the woman who died.
More than Noah’s mother.
More than the person betrayed by Victoria and Marcus.
She was complicated.
Alive until she wasn’t.
I began telling Noah stories that had nothing to do with the terrace.
How she hated olives.
How she danced badly.
How she once convinced me a stray cat belonged in our bedroom.
That was how memory should work.
May you like
Not as evidence.
As life.
