Chapter 9: A Different Address
Months adjusted the map of my life.
The temporary housing became a longer lease in a building with a working elevator and a front desk that understood restricted lists. Physical therapy restored enough function that I could return to work in a limited capacity, then fuller weeks as the leg allowed. Colleagues who had once received vague excuses about family obligations now received a simpler truth: I had been unsafe, I had left, I was rebuilding. Most did not press. The ones who did were not owed details.
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Diana moved the civil separation forward until the marriage existed only as a file heading toward final orders. Asset division accounted for the control of salary and the costs of recovery. There was no reunion clause, no mandatory mediation with people who had used a rolling pin as a teaching tool. Mason’s attempts to frame the matter as a cultural or generational misunderstanding failed to impress anyone whose job was to read the record rather than the family mythology.
I spoke to my parents about the year of the pregnancy loss without Beatrice’s voice narrating my failure. Grief for that absence had been postponed under survival. It arrived now in uneven waves, and I let it without assigning it to the kitchen floor as its only cause. Some losses belonged to the body. Some belonged to the household that had treated a child as a line item. Both could be true.
