Part Six: What Collapsed
The money went first, or most of it did — Thomas had his own accounts and some of the smaller inheritances, but the life he and Victoria had been living was built on the expectation of Mitchell Shipping, and without that expectation the architecture of the life became visible as what it had always been: expensive, leveraged, and dependent on someone else’s work.
Victoria left in the spring. She did it efficiently, which was how she did most things. There was a conversation, then attorneys, then a settlement that Thomas described to Eleanor, when he eventually described it, with the specific blankness of a man who has run out of the energy required to be angry.
The social circle contracted in the way that social circles contracted when the resource that had organized them was removed. Thomas discovered, methodically and with increasing clarity, which of his relationships had been about him and which had been about his position. It was not a large category, the first one.
He resigned from Mitchell Shipping eight weeks after the lawsuit was withdrawn. This was both required and, Eleanor thought, the first genuinely voluntary act he had taken in years. He came to her house to tell her in person, which she also noted.
He looked different. Not diminished — that was the word she would have expected and it was not the right word. He looked reduced to something essential. Like a room that has been cleared of furniture and is showing, for the first time, the quality of its walls.
“I don’t know what to do next,” he said. It was the most honest sentence she had heard from him in years.
“I know,” she said. “That’s not a bad place to start.”
