The house in Ithaca took three days to stop feeling foreign.
By the fourth morning, James had stopped noticing the creaking floorboards in the hallway. He'd stopped being startled by the way the kitchen light flickered when too many appliances were on. He'd even started to recognize which of the house's many quirks were charming and which were just annoying.
Sarah, meanwhile, had thrown herself into making the place livable. She'd cleaned every surface. She'd reorganized the kitchen cabinets by some system that only she understood. She'd found old sheets in the linen closet and washed them, spreading them across the beds like she was trying to erase the smell of abandonment that had settled into the house's bones.
Marcus had done less. He'd mostly wandered, exploring the property. The house sat on three acres of land that descended into woods. There was an old shed behind it, a fire pit, a weathered picnic table that hadn't been used in years. He'd walked the perimeter twice, as if mapping the boundaries of this temporary sanctuary.
By the seventh day, they'd established routines.
James woke at 6:30 AM and made coffee. The old Mr. Coffee machine on the counter gurgled and hissed in a way that would have been annoying in a city apartment. Here, it sounded almost peaceful. He sat at the kitchen table—solid oak, scarred with decades of use—and read articles on his laptop. Job listings. News. Anything that gave the impression he was still engaged with the world.
He wasn't. He was just going through motions.
Sarah left for a part-time job at a local bookstore around 9 AM. Keisha had helped arrange it—someone owed her a favor, and Sarah had gotten hired immediately as a "temporary consultant" helping reorganize their back office. It paid $18 an hour. Not great, but it was something. It was money. It was proof that Sarah could still function in the world.
Marcus had started working at a café in town. He'd found the job on Craigslist, applied in person, and been hired on the spot by a woman named Jennifer who seemed charmed by his self-deprecating humor and his willingness to work any shift. He was there from 10 AM to 4 PM most days.
So James was alone in the house most of the day.
He was supposed to be looking for work. He was supposed to be applying for jobs, updating his résumé, reaching out to contacts from his old firm. Instead, he sat at the kitchen table and thought about Emily.
On the seventh morning, Sarah didn't go to work.
"Call in sick," she'd said when James asked why she was still in the kitchen at 9:15 AM.
"Are you sick?" James had asked.
"I will be if I don't figure out what's happening here," Sarah had said. She'd poured herself a cup of coffee and sat across from him. "You've been staring at the same job listing for three days. You haven't applied for a single position."
"I've been thinking about it," James had said.
"That's not the same thing," Sarah had replied. Her voice wasn't angry. It was something worse—it was disappointed. "James, you have to do something. You can't just sit here and disappear."
"I'm not disappearing. I'm recovering."
"From what? From your marriage? From your job? From your life?" Sarah leaned back in her chair. "Because I've got news—recovery requires actually doing things. Not sitting."
James had closed his laptop. He couldn't look at Sarah. There was too much truth in her face.
"I got offered a job," Sarah had continued. "Teaching assistant position at Cornell. Keisha knows someone in the department. She called me yesterday. It's perfect for you. It pays, it's in your field, and it gets you out of this house."
"I'm not a teacher," James had said.
"You know research. You know academics. You can learn to teach."
"I can't," James had said. And then, because he couldn't help himself: "I don't deserve it."
Sarah had set her coffee down carefully. "What?"
"I destroyed someone's life, Sarah. I exposed his research fraud and it destroyed his entire career. His marriage. Everything. He went to prison because of me."
Sarah had been quiet for a long moment. "Did he commit a crime?"
"He falsified data. I reported it."
"That's not you destroying his life," Sarah had said. "That's him destroying his own life. You just exposed it."
"It feels like the same thing."
"It's not," Sarah had said firmly. "And sitting in this house, feeling sorry for yourself, doesn't fix anything. It just makes everyone miserable."
She'd left after that. She'd called the bookstore, made an excuse, and then she'd sat on the porch for two hours, smoking cigarettes she'd bummed off Marcus, staring at the woods.
James had watched her from the window and felt the weight of her disappointment like a physical thing.
Marcus returned from his café shift at 4:30 PM with a bag of day-old pastries.
"Jennifer felt bad for me," he'd said, dropping the bag on the counter. "She always gives me stuff before I leave. I think she has a thing for me."
"That's nice of her," Sarah had said. She was back in the kitchen now, pretending to cook dinner. There wasn't much to cook with—they'd gone grocery shopping but hadn't spent much money. Rice, beans, some vegetables that were starting to get soft.
"Yeah, well, I think she's lonely," Marcus had said. He was already eating one of the pastries. "You know that vibe? Where someone's nice to you not because they like you but because they're desperate for human interaction?"
"That's sad," Sarah had said.
"That's me in, like, three months," Marcus had replied. "Living in rural New York, working at a café, developing unhealthy attachments to my coworkers."
James had been listening from the living room. He'd heard the forced lightness in Marcus's voice. The deflection. Marcus was scared. Marcus was pretending that this was temporary, that he could still leave, that he hadn't already decided to stay.
On the eighth day, something changed.
A customer came into the café where Marcus was working. The guy was in his mid-twenties, attractive in that deliberately cultivated way—vintage glasses, expensive but casual clothes, the kind of person who'd probably moved upstate intentionally, looking for authenticity. He'd ordered an oat milk latte and asked Marcus for a recommendation for somewhere to eat.
Marcus had recommended the Thai place downtown.
The guy had come back the next day and asked if Marcus knew anywhere good to hike.
By day three, the guy—his name was David—had started coming in specifically for Marcus's shifts. By day four, he'd asked Marcus if he wanted to grab dinner.
By day eight, Marcus had come home and announced that he'd been offered a ride to California.
"David's leaving next week," Marcus had said. He'd said it carefully, like he was testing the words, seeing if they'd break. "He's driving to San Francisco. He asked if I wanted to come."
Sarah had set down her fork. "Are you going?"
"I don't know," Marcus had said. "Maybe. I mean, why not? What's keeping me here?"
There had been a long silence. James had known that Sarah was about to say something about loyalty. About the three of them having made a deal. About how you don't just leave when things get hard.
But Sarah hadn't said any of that. Instead, she'd said: "Do you want to go?"
Marcus had looked at her. "Yes," he'd said quietly. "I think I do."
"Then go," Sarah had said. And her voice had been sad, but not angry. She'd understood. Marcus was drowning here just like James was drowning. Marcus had just found a raft.
"I feel like I'm leaving you two," Marcus had said.
"You are," Sarah had replied. "But that's okay. We'll figure it out."
James had felt something crack inside him then. He'd felt the weight of Sarah's disappointment suddenly become much heavier. Because now it wasn't just about James failing to function. It was about the three of them failing to function together. It was about the fundamental fragility of their arrangement.
They were three broken people who'd thought that together they might fix each other. Instead, they were just breaking in parallel.
Marcus was leaving. That was the new reality. And once he was gone, James and Sarah would be alone in a house in Ithaca with nothing but each other and the accumulation of their shared failures.
That night, James stood on the back porch and looked at the woods.
The trees were dark shapes against a darker sky. Somewhere out there, beyond the property line, beyond Ithaca, beyond New York, Blake was walking free. Blake was planning something. Blake was, perhaps, thinking about James.
The thought should have terrified him.
Instead, it made him feel alive for the first time in weeks.
At least if Blake was coming for him, at least if there was a threat, then his isolation would mean something. It would mean he was in danger. It would mean the world outside still acknowledged his existence.
Sarah found him on the porch an hour later.
"Marcus is leaving tomorrow morning," she said. "He's packed already."
"I know," James had said.
"So it's just us," Sarah had said.
"Yeah," James had replied. "Just us."
Sarah had sat down on the porch railing. "We have to leave too. We can't stay in this house. Not with Marcus gone. It'll be too quiet. Too sad."
"Where would we go?"
"West," Sarah had said. "Anywhere. California. Arizona. Utah. Just somewhere else. Somewhere that isn't here."
James had thought about this. About leaving Ithaca. About getting back in the car. About running again.
"Okay," he'd said. "Let's go west."
And in the darkness of the Ithaca night, Sarah had smiled—the first real smile James had seen from her since Richmond.