Page 1 of Rowan: His Exception

Chapter One

CLAIRE

The wine is almost gone. The bottle's half-full of backwash and bad decisions, and I'm still pouring. Adele is on repeat, because apparently I want to feel every fucking thing tonight. Someone Like You.

Of course it is. It’s only fitting that I’d be drinking alone to a song about someone moving on.

I'm still wearing my wedding ring.

Pathetic. I know.

I keep touching it, spinning it, waiting for it to feel like it doesn’t belong. But it doesn’t. It’s been three weeks since I moved into this apartment, and everything still smells like the previous tenant's vanilla candles and my own failure.

The hardwood floors creak, making me flinch. The radiator hisses at 2 a.m. like it's judging me. I haven't hung anything on the walls. Daniel always handled the decorating. You have no eye detail or balance, Claire. He would always finish with…No need to be offended. It's not an insult. Just an observation.

God, he was such an asshole.

The divorce papers came three days ago, already signed. Daniel’s name, staring back at me in that perfect, precise handwriting of his. The same handwriting that wrote too much in the margins of a card I gave him on our first anniversary. I found it last month, cleaning out the closet of our…or should I say his house…in Arlington. He'd kept it and annotated it.

Too emotional. Too sensitive. Too many complaints. Never satisfied.

I'd stood there in that closet, the card trembling in my hand, realizing he'd kept it for six years. Not because he treasured it. But as a record of my flaws…weaknesses.

A case file.

I pour the last of the wine into a glass, the same ones we used for dinner parties where Daniel would correct my stories in front of our friends, his mother's condescending smile lingering at the corners of his mouth. The same smile she gave the time she rearranged my kitchen drawers "to help," when she called me emotional in that tone that meant unfit, when she watched him choose her side over and over, calling it "looking out for him."

Daniel would redirect the conversation with that measured sigh and knowing look. The same one that said I was embarrassing myself by feeling too openly. His mother had taught him that my feelings were a problem to manage, not a person to love.

The last dinner party, six months ago. I'd been telling the story of our honeymoon in Costa Rica…how I'd panicked during the zip-lining because the harness didn’t feel secure, how Daniel had gone first and waited at the bottom with his arms crossed while I cried on the platform. I'd meant it to be funny. Self-deprecating. I was such a mess, I'd said, laughing. Daniel had set down his wine glass with a soft click that meant he was about to perform patience.

"Claire's remembering it wrong," he'd said, smiling at our friends. "She didn't cry. She refused to go. I had to persuade her for twenty minutes while the guide stood there waiting. It was..." He'd paused, with that same sigh. "It was a lot."

Right away, I felt the room shift. I felt myself become the difficult wife, the too-much wife, the woman who made a man stand in the sun negotiating with a coward. I'd opened my mouth to say that's not what happened, I did cry, eventually going…but Daniel was already shifting the conversation onto something else, asking Marcus about his promotion. My correction would have been a lot, proving his point. That I was an embarrassment… an inconvenience. In Daniel’s mind, he viewed it as a lack of emotional depth, while to my face, calling it honesty.

My laptop is open on the counter, while the screen glows blue in the dark kitchen. I don't remember opening it. I don't remember typing wilderness survival Montana into the search bar, but there it is, my cursor blinking at the end of the phrase like a heartbeat.

What the fuck are you doing, Claire?

I don't know.

I don't know anything except that this apartment feels too small, the air too suffocating. Knowing if I have to sit here one more minute with Daniel's voice in my head listing my flaws, I will disintegrate into the hardwood.

The search results load. Then, a course in Cedar Ridge, Montana, pops up.

Seven days.

Not for beginners. Not for the faint of heart.

“What the hell,” I say to no one, clicking the link. The page loads slowly, pixel by pixel, testing my commitment. After a few minutes, there's a photo of pine trees against granite, a lake so blue it looks fake. Under that is a list of required gear. Daniel handled the camping. I was the one who packed the wrong socks, who complained about the weather, who made him stop the car so I could pee in a gas station instead of behind a tree. You're not an outdoors person, Claire. It's not a value judgment.

My finger hovers over the Register button.

You're too soft, Daniel's voice rings in my ears. It’s too hard. You'll quit. You always do.

I think of the card in the trash, his neat handwriting in the margins. Every measured sigh, every redirected conversation, every time I made myself smaller to fit inside his approval. I think of the zip-line platform, the too-loose harness hanging around my hips, the shame of being watched while I felt afraid…embarrassed.

Snap out of it, Claire. It’s in the past. Time to move on.