Chapter 6 - Two in the Morning
The motel outside Tilton, New Hampshire, smelled like carpet cleaner over years of cigarettes. I sat on the edge of the bed at six in the morning with my suitcase unopened and my laptop balanced on my knees.
The full weight of what I'd done came down on me like a load of gravel.
No family. No husband. No in-laws who'd bothered to call and ask if I was alive. That last one felt more like relief than loss.
I cried hard. The kind of crying I hadn't done since the hospital hallway where I signed my mother's hospice paperwork alone.
But I wasn't crying about Gloria. I was crying about my mom, about the fact that she would have grabbed me by the shoulders at year one and said, "Baby girl, you get in that truck and you drive." She'd have been right. I should have listened to the ghost of her a long time ago.
When the crying stopped, I washed my face, opened the laptop, and got to work.
Savings: $14,200. Enough for first and last month's rent and three months of expenses if I bought nothing I didn't need.
I pulled up the Montpelier listings I'd browsed before. There was a studio above a print shop on Langdon Street. Available immediately. Seven hundred a month, utilities included. I emailed the landlord.
Then I opened the Maine court website and filed a divorce petition. Uncontested. No children. No shared business. The form took forty minutes.
May you like
My first freelance email came in at 8:15. A regular client back in Hollis Bend needed a logo tweak for a fall menu. I finished it in two hours and invoiced seventy-five dollars.
Still working. Still standing.
