Chapter 12 - An Old Wound Resurfaces
Not everything settled as smoothly as I might have hoped. In October, almost exactly a year after the elevator that had started everything, Douglas requested an unusually long visit with Kayla, hoping to take her to Charleston for a weekend — a request that, given the property's history, struck me immediately as tone-deaf at best.
"Absolutely not," I told him over the phone, my calm from the past year briefly cracking into something sharper. "You are not taking our daughter to the city where you bought a condo with money you stole from her own college fund."
"That's not fair, Marissa. I sold that condo. It's ancient history now."
"It's fourteen months old, Douglas. And it's not ancient history to her."
We compromised, eventually, on a weekend trip to the mountains instead — neutral ground, no complicated associations attached — but the argument left me shaken in a way I hadn't expected, old anger resurfacing with an intensity that surprised me given how far I'd genuinely moved past the initial devastation.
Kayla noticed my mood that evening, perceptive as always. "You're still angry at him," she said. Not quite a question.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "Not about the marriage ending anymore. I've made peace with that. But sometimes about the specific ways he hurt you, and Marcus, and how casually he seemed willing to sacrifice your future for something he wanted for himself."
"I think about it too," Kayla said. "Less than I used to. But it doesn't just disappear."
"No," I agreed. "It doesn't. But it does get easier to carry, over time. And you're carrying it remarkably well, for what it's worth."
The mountain trip, when it happened in November, went smoothly enough — Kayla returned describing it as "fine, actually, kind of nice," a phrase that suggested genuine, if cautious, progress in her relationship with her father, separate from whatever complicated feelings I still carried about him myself.
Around the same time, my tentative conversations with Theo Ramsey had grown into an actual, if careful, dating relationship — slow, deliberate, built on long conversations rather than grand gestures, the exact opposite of the whirlwind romance that had once swept me into marriage with Douglas at twenty-four, before I'd fully understood what I was agreeing to build my life around.
May you like
"You don't have to rush anything," Theo told me one evening, sensing my hesitation as our relationship moved toward something more serious. "I'm not going anywhere, Marissa. Take whatever time you need."
It was such a small thing to say, and yet it struck me, in that moment, as the most genuinely reassuring thing anyone had said to me in over a year — not a promise dressed up in engraved perfume bottles and carefully chosen words, but simple, unhurried patience, offered without any expectation attached to it at all.
