Healing grief has a destination; it moves through you toward something, toward action, toward change, toward a locked door and a new life.
Trapping grief has nowhere to go; it circles, and deepens, and becomes an identity, until you are not a woman who was hurt but a woman who is hurt, permanently, as a way of being.
I refused to become the second kind.
I wept for one hour in a hospital bed.
And then I picked up the phone, not because I had stopped hurting, but because I had decided that my hurt was going to build something instead of drowning me.
The planning was not the absence of grief.
It was grief, finally, with somewhere to go.
Chapter 6 — Two in the Morning
At two in the morning, when the hospital had gone quiet, I called a college friend who had become a senior litigation attorney, and I told him, in a whisper, exactly what I needed.
“I need to get out of here without them knowing where I go,” I said.
“And I want to press full criminal charges.
All of them.”
And then I told him something that Bruno and his parents, in their arrogance, had completely forgotten.
Five years earlier, when Indigo’s business had failed and he had come within weeks of losing that gated-suburb house to a defaulted commercial loan, it had been me who stepped in and covered nearly all of the mortgage payments to save it.
And I, being an accountant, being careful, being exactly the sort of woman my grandmother had raised, had kept everything.
Every wire-transfer receipt.
