Part Eight: What Grief Becomes
She had a therapist. She had started seeing her four months after the burial, when Elias was stable and the legal proceedings were in their sustained middle phase and she had the first real interval in which she could afford to stop doing the necessary things and sit with the other ones.
Dr. Lena Farrow had an office on the third floor of a building near the river, with a window that looked out over a small park where people walked dogs in the mornings and where, in spring, someone planted flowers along the path in the unofficial, uncredited way that anonymous civic improvements are made. Claire had started going weekly and had moved to biweekly at six months, not because things had gotten worse but because they had gotten to the stage where the work was slower and deeper and required less frequency and more time between sessions.
She talked about Samuel. She talked about the cemetery and the rain, which she had not spoken about to anyone except Mara and Detective Rowe in the specific, evidentiary way that the legal situation required. Talking about it to Dr. Farrow was different — was the version of talking that is not for any purpose except the talking, which she had been told about theoretically and had not previously had sufficient patience for.
She discovered, over the months, that grief did not resolve in the way that problems resolved. It changed shape. It became integrated rather than separate — no longer a room she was locked out of but a country she was learning to live in, with the same ordinary life continuing alongside it. She could laugh at something Elias did — the first time he found his own feet, the moment at four months when he had looked at her with the focused intentionality of someone who has just understood that the face he is looking at is important and that looking at it carefully is worthwhile — and the laugh was real, complete, unqualified by the grief. The grief was also real, complete, unqualified by the laugh. These were not contradictions.
She thought about what Samuel had said in the first year of their marriage, during a conversation that had been about something specific and had become about something larger, the way conversations sometimes do when you are with the right person: I think most things that are worth anything take longer than people want them to take. He had been talking about the company then, about the impatience of building something from the ground up. She had thought about it in the hospital waiting for Elias to arrive. She thought about it now.
She was building something. Not from scratch — Samuel had done the foundational work, both in the company and in what they had built together, and she was working from what he had left, which was more than she sometimes gave herself credit for. She was building a life for herself and for Elias in the way that single mothers build lives when they are also managing a company and an estate and the aftermath of a fraud investigation and the integrated grief of someone who has lost the person they built their daily life around.
It was slow. It was imperfect. There were days when the slowness and the imperfection were more than she had resources to manage gracefully, and she managed them with less than grace and then went to sleep and tried again the next day. There were days when Elias looked at her with Samuel’s dark eyes and she felt the loss as sharp and new as it had been in November, and she sat with it until it moved through, and then she got up.
She did not think about Vivian. She had made a decision about this — not a moral decision, not a decision about forgiveness, which was something she reserved the right to reach conclusions about in her own time and by her own process. A practical decision: the people who had tried to take things from her did not deserve the tenancy of her attention. They had taken enough already. She was not going to let them take more.
