I stared at the right side of the paper. Received remained a stark, empty expanse of white space.
I picked up the pen and drew a single, dark dash in the right column.
I flipped to a fresh piece of paper. Two new headers. What they assume versus What I actually want.
They assume I don’t mind babysitting nine screaming children. They assume I don’t require sleep. They assume my calendar is an empty void waiting to be filled by their emergencies. They assume I will open my wallet because I always have.
On the right side, the truth bled out in blue ink. I want to be invited, not assigned. I want to enjoy a meal, not host a circus. I want to sit at the head of the table, not serve it. I want to be recognized as a human being, not a domestic resource.
I turned to the corkboard beside the fridge. Pinned beneath a grocery list was a postcard I had received in September. My oldest friend, Nadine, had called me on a Saturday while I was scrubbing marker off my walls—Maria had dropped her kids off without warning yet again. Nadine had laughed her throaty, cigarette-stained laugh and said, “Come out to the desert for Christmas, Reenie. I’ve got a ranch in New Mexico. We’ll drink heavy red wine by the fire and let the young folks ruin their own lives for a change.”
I had politely declined. Family comes first, I had written on the back of the card.
The morning sun began to bleed through the kitchen blinds. I pulled my cell phone from the pocket of my robe, my thumb hovering over the dial pad. I dialed the catering company.
“Mrs. Marlow,” the polite coordinator answered. “Is there an issue with the menu for the 25th?”
“I need to cancel the entire order,” I said, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears—steady, unyielding.
Keyboard clicks echoed over the line. “I… see. We can process a partial refund, minus the deposit. You’ll receive roughly one thousand and forty dollars back to your card.”
“Do it,” I commanded.
I hung up, feeling a strange, terrifying lightness in my chest, like a tight fist unclenching after a decade. I walked to the hallway closet and pulled down my leather overnight bag. Just as the zipper bit shut, my phone vibrated violently against the wood of the dresser. It was Logan. And the voicemail icon was already flashing, a digital warning that the fallout had officially begun.
Chapter 3: Fugitive on Interstate 10
I didn’t listen to the voicemail. I didn’t even read the panicked text messages that began flooding my screen ten minutes later. By the time the neighborhood woke up to retrieve their Sunday papers, my car was already merging onto the interstate, the trunk holding a small suitcase packed with three pairs of jeans, a few heavy sweaters, and a paperback novel I had been trying to finish for two years.
I was driving southwest, aiming the nose of my sedan toward the endless, baked expanse of New Mexico.
The first few hours felt like a dangerous, illicit escape. I kept checking my rearview mirror, half-expecting to see Logan’s SUV tailing me, demanding I pull over and assume my post. But as the cramped, gray suburbs gave way to the sprawling, golden landscape of the American Southwest, the physical weight pressing down on my lungs began to evaporate.
