At home, or rather in the house that is now legally and emotionally mine, grief arrives in stranger waves.
Not for Ethan. That grief is mostly compost now, turning into something useful.
But for Margaret.
I miss her in flashes.
When a board member tries to patronize me and I wish for one of her diamond-edged remarks.
When I pass the dressing room and still expect to hear the rustle of silk and the clink of bracelets.
When I make tea in the late afternoon and remember the way she used to ask invasive questions in a tone that somehow made evasion feel cowardly.
I begin reading her journal in the evenings, not all of it, just enough to hear her mind again.
One night I find an entry written a month before she died.
Claire still thinks gentleness disqualifies her from command.
It does not.
It merely means that if she learns to use power, she may do less damage with it than the rest of us did.
I close the journal and cry then.
Not because the sentence is kind exactly. Margaret was rarely kind in any ordinary form.
But because she saw me more clearly than I saw myself.
Winter arrives.
The divorce is finalized in January.