Large. Empty in a way that had taken her two years to name.
She did not drive to a hotel. She did not drive in circles waiting for a plan to appear. She drove to Mrs. Parker’s house on the north side of the city, to the woman who had been her mentor before marriage and parenthood and the slow gravitational pull of the Calloway family had made her hard to reach.
Mrs. Parker was the woman who had hired her twelve years ago, fresh out of her accounting program and still learning to hold her professional opinions with the confidence they deserved. She had looked at Claire’s first set of audit notes and said, quietly, without fanfare, “You don’t miss much.” Claire had carried that sentence around for years like a document she kept returning to. It had felt, more than once, like proof of something she was at
