Hollowed

Dana came to Stonebrook in June because Mara asked her to and because, on some level Dana declined to examine, she wanted to see whether the exile's life was as golden as it looked from the outside. (It is a law of unhappy marriages that they treat other people's happiness as a rumor to be investigated.)

She stayed two weeks. The estate was beautiful in the way of professionally beautiful things — the horses, the chefs, the restored barn with its glass roof — and Mara was beautiful in the way of women being photographed by their own biographers: gracious, luminous, finished, a word Dana heard Mara use about herself and hated.

"They're building me a hospital wing," Mara said, driving her past the village. "The Mara Callahan Maternal Health Center. Can you imagine? His mother's circle gives to it. It's their penance and their trophy — they get to say my name in public so they never have to say it at dinner." She laughed, and it was the old laugh, and Dana wanted to shake her.

The truth was on the second day, when the men went off to the shooting party and the house emptied of its performance. Mara, alone with Dana over the ruins of lunch, stopped hosting.

"I can't divorce him," she said. "You know that by now — I get the same four sentences from four lawyers, and they all end with custody of Danny forfeited and the Callahan name in every filing. Grant would never actually proceed, he's stated it, it's his monument. So I exist in the space between his monument and Mercer's mother. Mercer —" she stopped, and Dana watched her choose, for the first time in her life, to tell the truth to a woman instead of performing strength. "Mercer is beginning to want things I can't give him. Not other women. I'd survive other women; I'd understand them. He wants a life — a legitimate one, children with his name, a wife at the trustees' table. And every day he wants it a little more politely, and the politeness is worse than shouting, Dana, because politeness is how he files me. I've become a line item he hasn't yet had the courage to write down."

Dana held her hand across the table. "Then leave him," she said gently. "Or leave the pretense. Or — Mara — I don't know. But I watched you at twenty-three get my own husband out of a scandal with three phone calls and a smile, and I want the old Mara back for five minutes just to ask her one question."

"Ask."

"What do you want? Not the boy, not the man, not the mothers. You."

Mara looked out the window at the perfect lawns, and gave the answer that was, unknown to both of them, the plot of her final year: "I want to stop being the problem in other people's lives. And I want my son. And I can't have either, and I can't stop wanting them, and Mercer is starting to notice the wanting. That's all. That's the whole of it. I'm not unhappy, Dana. I'm hollowed. It's different. Unhappy is loud."

The shooting weekend brought its own small weather. Mercer's neighbor and frenemy, the dairy-tech magnate Kessler, brought a lawyer named Trey, who drank too much and flirted at Mara with the harmless idiocy of a man who has never been told no by the correct person. Mercer, watching from across the paddock, felt the first cold arithmetic of jealousy — she is thirty-eight, I am thirty-four, the world supplies newer women annually — and hated himself for the feeling and fed it anyway.

Donovan, down from Meridian for the day to walk a strip of woodland Kessler was selling, saw none of the drama and everything else: he watched Mara move through her own house like a queen in a foreign country, and went home that night and told Lily, unwisely, that he pitied her. Lily, seven months pregnant and large with a happiness she had purchased with two years of suffering, heard something else entirely — she heard that Donovan noticed Mara, that the whole world noticed Mara, that Mara was the story and Lily was the epilogue. They fought about it in a series of sentences so small a marriage counselor would have missed them: you said pitied; I said the estate; that's not what I meant; then what did you mean. They made up before dawn, because they were young and it was their first war and both of them still believed in unconditional surrender.

Mara, upstairs, heard nothing of it. She had taken one of the pills — the small white American ones that the nice doctor in the city prescribed sparingly — to sleep, and lain in the beautiful dark beside a sleeping man who loved her and was slowly, politely leaving, and listened to the freight trains that ran, a valley away, through the hours she could no longer sleep through. It had become a habit, the listening. She did not yet know the word for what it was becoming.