It felt like a death march.
The past week had been the thorniest and worst of her whole life.
They’d talked about the logistics of leaving the house empty for three months—it wasn’t ideal. Elysia offered to get the mail once a week if Sam and Will were both out of town, and Will had made it very clear he intended to spend the time traveling.
He’d booked a month in Hawaii, and had asked Sam all kinds of questions about the places they had gone last time they’d been there on a family vacation, and it had been all she could do to not smother him with a couch cushion, because did he really expect her to plan his vacation during their separation?
She’d finally groused at him, and he hadn’t asked again.
Sam figured she should make some plans. She just felt…listless about it. She’d only gone as far as to book the next week in a vacation rental in town so she could make her plans without Will looming around her.
She was usually so good at planning.
Will had spent years building his real estate business, but he’d started out working for a larger group. Sam had done freelance writing for different online platforms, usually focusing on meal plans, budgets, organization, parenting, vacationing with children. That was her entire life, after all.
She felt like she needed to pull up one of her own articles on the subject to remind herself that she did know how to get a vacation together.
She and Will had planned the scaffolding of this “summer,” and it had felt so absurd to open up their phone calendars and synchronize a marital separation. They’d landed on the third week of May, all the way to the second week of September, when Ethan would be back for a week before classes started up again.
She could have laughed. It was so much the same and so much different all at the same time. Planning summer holidays around the kids.
Right now she was circling her bedroom—their bedroom that they wouldn’t share for nearly the next four months—like she didn’t remember how to do anything.
What clothes did you take with you into an extended vacation from your marriage?
She was glad they’d decided to make the house neutral ground. She couldn’t have Will using it as a home base for…dates.
She might be willing to let him have his freedom for the summer, but by God, it would not be on her mattress. She wouldn’t be able to get past that.
She’d discovered a lot of interesting things about herself in the last forty-eight hours.
That was one of them. That it made her want to gag to imagine sleeping in a bed her husband had made love to someone else in.
Bleh.
Add the thought of her husbandmaking loveto anyone else to that list.
She had to think of it as a new…hobby for him. Like the time he played pickleball for a few months and then stopped. Nothing emotional, all just physical. Something he’d get over.
Reduce it to body parts, but not involve emotions.
She didn’tlikeit. But she could cope.
She took another circle around the room. Will had taken his clothes out already.
He was finalizing a sale and then preparing to just…not take new clients on for the next few months. What a great life they had that he could even do that. That they could both afford this.
It was ironic, she thought. They’d built this beautiful, stable life, and she’d thought it was so they could enjoy it together, but it was actually the very thing that was allowing them to do this separation.
With Will out of the house, she decided to play the kind of very loud pop punk she had loved since high school that he thought was annoying. She’d keep it on when he got back too. Because they’d done the together part of this, and now they were separate. Not a couple. Two different people.
Notthe same page. They might as well be in two totally different books.
She hated it.
So she started singing as loudly and tunelessly as possible, trying to drown out all the confusion inside of her. She opened up the kitchen trash and jerked the bag up, so hard and fast it strained her muscles, and she welcomed it because she kind of wanted to hurt herself right now.
She walked to the front door and opened it, and nearly ran into a human being.