Chapter 181 Margaux’s Full Healing

Chapter 181 Margaux’s Full Healing
Margaux’s apartment smelled like something she had been cooking since morning.

Not the elaborate production of someone performing domesticity, the easy smell of someone who cooked because it was how they occupied themselves and they were good at it and also having food ready when people arrived was how she expressed something she had never found straightforward words for.

She was at the stove when I came through the door.

She looked back over her shoulder.

“Sit down,” she said. “Ten minutes.”

I sat at her kitchen table.

The apartment was hers in a way that still struck me sometimes… not just legally or practically, but genuinely. The arrangement of things. The books on the shelf in an order that made sense to her rather than to anyone else. The plant on the windowsill that had been dying when she moved in and was now thriving because Margaux had decided it would.

The rug she had chosen herself.

The lamp she had bought the third week and which threw the right quality of light across the kitchen in the evenings.

Small things.

But they were hers.

All of them chosen without consulting anyone. Without checking whether they were acceptable. Without the caution of someone who had spent too long in a house where everything had been Gerald’s preference performed as shared preference.

This was just… her.

She made lunch properly.

Two courses. A soup that had clearly been started that morning and a main that she served with the brief confidence of someone who knew it was good and wasn’t going to undermine the knowledge by asking whether it was good.

We ate.

She told me about a woman in her building… seventies, recently widowed, who had started leaving her door open on weekend afternoons because she was used to the sound of another person and the silence was too much. Margaux had taken to stopping in. Not scheduled. Just stopping.

“Do you know her well?” I asked.

“Getting to,” Margaux answered. “She makes excellent tea. She doesn’t ask questions she’s not ready to hear the answers to.” A pause. “Which is a quality I appreciate.”

“Did you tell her about…” I started.

“About me?” Margaux asked. “Some of it. The version that’s relevant without being everything.” She cleared the soup bowls. “She told me about her husband. Three years of illness before he went. The kind of tiredness that came from loving someone through something like that.” She set the bowls in the sink. “We’re finding the edges of what we each want to say.” A pause. “That’s its own kind of friendship.”

She brought the main.

We ate.

The afternoon moved outside the window in its quiet way.

At some point she said: “I’ve been thinking about something.”

“Ok, spill it,” I said.

“Forgiveness,” she said. “Not of Gerald, I’ve been through that and I’ve arrived somewhere with it.” She looked at the table. “Self-forgiveness.” She paused. “Which is harder.” Another pause. “Forgiving someone else requires understanding what they did and deciding it doesn’t define the relationship. Self-forgiveness requires understanding what you did and deciding it doesn’t define you.” She looked at me. “I’m further along than I was. I’m not finished.”

“You don’t have to be finished.”

“No,” she agreed. “But I want to be honest about where I am rather than presenting a version that’s further along than the reality.” She looked at the table. “I’m better than I was. I’m not who I was before Gerald. I don’t know if I’ll get back there.” A pause. “I’m not certain I want to get back there. That person didn’t see what was in front of her.” She looked at me. “I’d rather be someone who sees.”

I looked at her.

“You see,” I nod. “Clearly.”

“More than before, It costs something.”

“Yes,” I replied. “It did.”

She looked at the window.

“I’ve been thinking about your father lately,” she continued. “Differently from before.” A pause. “Not with guilt. With… curiosity.” Another pause. “Who he would have been at sixty. Sixty-five.” She looked at the table. “Whether his jokes would have got better or worse.” A brief almost-smile. “I think worse. More confident in the delivery.”

“Much worse,” I said. “He would have doubled down.”

She nodded.

“He would have, he doubled down on everything he decided was right.”

We sat with that.

The good kind of sitting.

Then Margaux stood up.

Went to the dresser in the corner… the one she had brought from storage when she moved in, the only piece of furniture from her previous life that she had kept because it had been hers before Gerald and had stayed hers through him.

She opened the bottom drawer.

Something in the deliberateness of the movement told me she had been thinking about this specifically, not spontaneous, prepared. More like that action of someone who had decided that today was the right day for something they had been carrying for a while.

She came back to the table with a photograph.

Set it between us.

I looked at it.

A young man.

Late twenties approximately. Laughing at something off-camera… a real laugh, the kind that arrived before you could organize your face around it. Dressed in clothes that dated the photograph clearly… early nineties, the specific fashion of a decade that hadn’t known yet what it was doing.

The face.

I knew the face.

I had stared at it in the founding documentation photograph, in the portrait, in the framed photograph on the wall of my office.

But not this version.

This version existed before Callum Corporation. Before Gerald. Before any of it. Before the weight of what was coming had arrived to be carried.

This was David Callum at twenty-seven or twenty-eight.

Laughing.

Just laughing.

At something off-camera that I would never know.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“It was in a box I didn’t open for eight years,” Margaux smiled. “I opened it last month.” She looked at the photograph. “I wasn’t ready before last month.” A beat. “I think I was afraid of what it would feel like to see him like this.” She looked at the photograph. “Young. Before.”

“How does it feel?”

She looked at the photograph for a long moment.

“Like meeting someone I already loved,” she answered.