Eyes dry.
Jaw set.
I said it out loud just to hear it.
“We’ll see.”
The road west was empty.
I turned the radio to something without words and drove until Blackwood was nothing but a name on a sign I had already passed.
The motel outside Concord, New Hampshire, smelled like carpet cleaner and stale smoke from years before. I sat on the edge of the bed at six in the morning with my suitcase unopened and my laptop balanced on my knees.
The full weight of what I had done landed on me like a bag of gravel.
No family.
No husband.
No in-laws who had called to check on me.
That last one felt more like relief than loss.
I had a suitcase, a laptop, and a savings account that would stretch three months if I did not do anything reckless.
I cried hard, the kind of crying I had not done since the hospital hallway where I signed my mother’s hospice paperwork alone.
But I was not crying about Barbara.
I was crying about my mom, about the fact that she would have grabbed me by the shoulders at year one and said, “Baby girl, you get in that truck and you drive.”
She would have been right.
I should have listened to the ghost of her sooner.
When the crying stopped, I washed my face, opened my laptop, and got to work.
Savings account: $14,200.
Enough for first and last month’s rent, plus three months of expenses if I ate simply and bought nothing I did not need.
I searched Burlington rentals, the same listings I had browsed before. There was a studio above a print shop on Church Street. Available immediately. Seven hundred dollars a month. Utilities included.
I emailed the landlord.
Then I opened the Maine court website and filed a divorce petition.
Uncontested. No children. No shared business.
The form took forty minutes.
My first freelance email came in at 8:15. A regular client in Blackwood needed a logo revision for their fall menu.
I finished it in two hours, invoiced seventy-five dollars, and closed the laptop.
Still working.
Still standing.
Two weeks later, I was standing in a studio apartment on Church Street in Burlington, Vermont, holding a coffee mug with nothing else in the room except a folding table, a chair from Goodwill, and a view of the Green Mountains through a window that actually opened.
The space was four hundred square feet. It smelled like ink and old paper from the print shop downstairs.
The floors were scratched hardwood. The radiator clanked when it kicked on.
I loved it immediately.
The print shop owner was a woman named Maureen, mid-fifties, divorced, silver hair cut short, reading glasses permanently pushed up on her forehead, and a voice like she had been giving directions her whole life and expected people to follow them.
She ran the shop alone.
Offset printing. Business cards. Event programs. The kind of work big chains could not do with a personal touch.
The first morning, she was pulling a tray of freshly printed wedding invitations when I came down for coffee. She looked me over: suitcase-sized bags under my eyes, wrinkled shirt, laptop clutched like a life raft.
“Morning,” she said. “You the new tenant?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
