PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
On a Tuesday morning, Abby Mercer was fired before her latte had cooled.
Marcy from Human Resources said restructuring with the careful sympathy of a woman who had eaten lunch with Abby on Friday and now had a folder open between them. The conference room fluorescents hummed overhead. Abby’s cup sat between them, still warm, her name written correctly on the side for once.
“I’m sorry,” Marcy said.
Abby looked at the folder. Then at Marcy. Her brain, which had spent fifteen years translating bad news into language people could survive in meetings, began arranging the facts before the rest of her could catch up.
Her position had been eliminated. The decision was final. Ten weeks of severance. Insurance through the end of the month.
“Effective when?”
Marcy’s eyes moved toward the cup. “Today.”
“Today as in after lunch?”
“Today as in now. You can finish the day if that feels better, or you can go home.”
Abby waited for the sentence to become less absurd. It declined.
“I’m going home.”
“Of course.” Marcy slid one final page across the table. “There’s also an Employee Exit Survey. You don’t have to complete it right now.”
There were one hundred and twenty questions.
Abby stared at the first one. On a scale from one to five, how valued had she felt by the organization? Read the room, Marcy.
Marcy closed the folder.
Most of the office had not arrived yet. Abby should have been grateful for that. Instead, she took it personally. Fifteen years, and they had scheduled her disappearance before the building was awake enough to witness it.
She found a Panda Express catering bag in the supply closet, left over from Tiffany’s baby shower. Abby had ordered the food, collected the money, remembered which sauce Tiffany liked, built the centerpieces the night before, and stayed late to clean the conference room afterward. A catering bag looked less like a confession than a cardboard box, so she packed her life into it.
A stapler. Three years of birthday cards. Two framed photographs of Isaac. The blue mug Katie had given her after a launch neither of them slept through, her “good” pen, and a stack of Beachside Café Post-it Notes went in last. Payment for the wrongdoing.
She knew the exact gluten-free preferences of twelve people who would not text her that afternoon. She knew who was pregnant, who was interviewing elsewhere, and who ate salads at her desk while admitting her marriage also might be over. She had also made the flowers. Every baby shower, every work anniversary, every birthday on that floor for fifteen years, cut and arranged at her kitchen table the night before and carried in on the passenger seat so they would not tip. Nobody had ever asked who did them. That part she had liked. An hour with the good scissors and nothing on the table but stems was the quietest hour of her month.
The elevator stopped on four and nobody got on. In the lobby, the security guard lifted one hand without looking away from his monitor.
Outside, the California sun was already too bright. Abby set the catering bag on the passenger-side floor, climbed behind the wheel, and cried hard enough that she had to wait until she could breathe evenly enough to drive.
The latte went cold in the cup holder.
At home, the divorce papers were still on the kitchen counter where they had been for three weeks, gradually becoming part of the furniture. In less than three weeks, she would leave Isaac at college. She set the Panda Express bag on the floor and counted: ten weeks of severance, one apartment lease, one tuition payment scheduled for Friday.
She took a bath and ordered a six-dollar large pepperoni pizza from Little Caesars. Apparently, she was on a budget now. Two slices disappeared over the sink. She checked her phone often enough to establish that nobody from work was having trouble finding her number.
Sometime after two, Maple slept against her foot while Abby scrolled. The phone was the only light in the apartment. Then a video stopped her thumb.
A woman with purple hair stood behind a coffee bar, pouring an amber drink into a ceramic cup. Steam curled toward the camera. Flour, or possibly glitter, floated through the light.
“Honey-lavender oat milk,” the woman said. “Bee pollen on top. Don’t make that face until you’ve tried it.”
The caption read: “The Salty Cup. Silverpine Bay, Maine. Come find us.”
Abby watched it four times.
She had always wanted to see Maine. David, her soon-to-be ex-husband, had always said they would go eventually. Eventually, she now understood, was where their plans went to die.
The town’s website led to a history page involving a Scottish founder, a borrowed map, a broken compass, poor navigation, and, inexplicably, a donkey named Hamish. Abby skimmed most of it. What stayed was the harbor, the pine trees, and the uncomfortable thought that a place founded by someone who arrived by mistake might not be the worst place to disappear on purpose.
“Okay,” she said.
On the laptop screen, one porch light burned above the harbor.