Some wounds take longer because they are not singular. They accumulate in small repetitions — a tight smile, a water glass lifted at the wrong moment, a sentence that translates to: your pain is inconvenient for me right now. Forgiving a single injury was different from forgiving a pattern.
“What happens now?” Leah asked.
Denise let out a long, unsteady breath. “I don’t know yet. But I left his house this morning.”
That surprised Leah more than anything else had.
Raymond resigned before NorthRiver completed its review, framing it to anyone who asked as a matter of politics and disloyal subordinates and what he described as a culture of oversensitivity — which was the vocabulary men like Raymond used when consequence finally arrived and they needed a different name for it. Denise moved into a short-term rental near Marjorie and, for the first time in several years, took a part-time bookkeeping job instead of depending on someone else’s income. Trevor and Kayla began seeing Denise separately from Raymond and stopped pretending the two situations could coexist. Marjorie, released from the obligation of pretending, admitted she had disliked him from the first introduction.