2025
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The landscape deserved wonder. Heather rolled across the hillsides like a faded quilt, and stone walls seemed to have been stitched throughout in uneven seams. The sky broke open in a gray-blue sweep that seemed larger than any Claire had ever seen back home. The air itself was different—sharper, cleaner, threaded with the faint tang of the sea.
She sat in the passenger seat of the rental car, which at home would be the driver’s seat, and pressed her forehead lightly to the glass, drinking it all in. Scotland was gorgeous, everything she’d imagined. Her first trip to Europe.
Too bad the trip sucked.
Too bad she hadn’t come here under different circumstances, wasn’t tallying every silence and every sigh beside her. Too bad she hadn’t come with someone other than her husband.
Jason’s hands were fixed at ten and two on the wheel, eyes straight ahead, expression unreadable. He drove the narrow country road as if it were any stretch of turnpike back in Pennsylvania, as if the hills and lochs and crumbling stone towers weren’t worth a second glance.
His jaw was as tense as his hands, eyes and brows rigid. Claire knew the look—it meant he was somewhere else entirely.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said, her voice deliberately light.
She was able to count to seven before he answered. “Yeah. Sure.”
Nothing more. No shared smile, no follow-up statement or question.
Claire shifted in her seat, pushing down the old ache that rose whenever she tried. Trying had become its own habit between them—empty gestures, careful tones, a constant, exhausting performance of “making it work.” The counselor had told them to take this trip, to reconnect.Find common ground,she’d urged. Claire suspected the woman had known, even then, that there was none left to find.
Claire certainly knew that. She wasn’t sure why she’d bugged Jason to agree to this, why she thought it might help. In truth, she was already planning her escape, had found a small house to rent near her parents’ house, though she’d not put a deposit down or anything. She’d already contacted a lawyer, had set a meeting to discuss divorce, scheduled for the end of this month—she’d made the appointmentafterthey’d booked this trip; she’d known.
She folded her hands in her lap, staring at the rings on the finger of her left hand. Five years married. Ten years together. Long enough to accumulate a house, furniture, and routines—and at least one side chick, apparently— and short enough that her mother assured her,You’re young, you’ll move on.And yet here they were, crossing an ocean for a last attempt neither of them really believed in.
Not for the first time, she thought that she should have followed her gut ten years ago, back when they were still only dating, when the doubts had already been whispering that Jason wasn’t the one for her or she for him, not in the way she needed. But after the car accident, he’d been there for her. She could not deny that. For six long weeks while she lay in the hospital, broken and mending, Jason had shown up—every day, steadyand attentive, holding her hand, speaking words she had wanted so badly to believe. In those fragile weeks, his presence had assured her of his love, and his commitment.
And in truth, it had been good for a while.
She was sure it had been love, she told herself; it must have been, or she’d never have married him. But it was hard to remember now, hard to summon what she’d once felt beside the hollowness that filled her in the present. Up until about six months ago, she almost believed she could love him again, that the marriage was salvageable. Instead, it seemed they both carried ghosts into every room. She knew exactly who his was—she had a name, a face, a perfume Claire had caught on the collar of his shirt one rainy Saturday morning while doing laundry. And she suspected he wished, even now, that it were that other woman in the seat beside him, not his wife.
Jason had been the one to fight hardest against divorce. Not for her, not for them, but for himself. He couldn’t bear the idea of failure, of being a man who hadn’t held his marriage together. What he wanted, Claire had come to realize, was not a partner but a compliant, silent wife, someone who wouldn’t question him and wouldn’t interfere in his life outside their home.
“Where to next?” Jason asked, eyes on the road.
God, when was the last time he looked at her, really looked and saw her?
“The abbey ruins,” she said. “I read about them—”
He exhaled sharply. “Another pile of rocks.”
Here, she knew, she was expected to concede, to read between his lines and understand he didn’t want to go, and she was meant to surrender, to spare them open conflict. Those days were long gone.
“We said we’d stop,” she reminded him calmly. “I’m not spending every day, all day, in pubs.”
Fifteen minutes later, when they pulled off the road near whatwasessentially a pile of rocks, Jason looked through the windshield skeptically at the gray stone. “Fifteen minutes, all right?”
Claire ignored him and his directive, looking out again at the Highlands as she stepped out of the car, letting the beauty of it rush in. She wanted to feel something real. She wanted to breathe, to remember who she was before betrayal, before mistrust, before the slow death of love.
Scotland, at least, made herfeel.
The truth was, she suspected that being with Jason had never truly been good for her—not even in the beginning, when she’d convinced herself it was. Even at its best, their relationship had pressed her to be someone she wasn’t. She hadn’t grown into the woman she wanted to become; she had grown into the woman Jason wanted beside him. All those years, she had measured her words, softened her edges, tucked away the restless pieces of herself until she hardly recognized what was left.
The only place she still felt like herself was at work. At the hospital, she was competent, respected, and encouraged. She mattered. She made a difference as a nurse. And the contrast only made it more clear how small she had allowed herself to become everywhere else, living in andasJason’s shadow.
Shaking off her melancholy—something she’d been forced to do often over the past four days in Scotland, Claire approached the ruins. The abbey sat half-swallowed by the earth, its roof long since collapsed, its walls jagged teeth against the sky. Claire stood at the edge of the ruins and felt a rush of something that had nothing to do with the wind tugging at her jacket. Reverence, maybe. Or the sense that history pressed close here, the air weighted with all the lives that had passed through this place. Her mother had always said she was an old soul, that she’d been born in the wrong century.
