Marin turned to her husband last, the way you look at someone when you're offering them one final chance to be the person you married instead of the person he'd let himself become.
"Julian," she said. Just his name. Nothing more.
He looked at the floor instead of at her. "Please, Marin," he said. "Don't make this harder than it needs to be."
Six years, and that was the version of goodbye he chose.
Constance had already turned to a staff member, instructing him to have Marin's things brought down and set outside, framed for every camera in the room as Marin's own decision to walk away rather than what it actually was: an eviction dressed up as dignity.
Marin didn't argue. She didn't raise her voice, and she didn't cry in front of people who would have enjoyed watching her do it. She simply picked up the small bag that had, without her fully admitting it to herself, already been sitting by the closet door for weeks—because some quiet, honest part of her had known this night was coming long before Julian walked through that door with someone else on his arm.
She walked out into the cold. She stood on the front steps of a house with her name nowhere on the deed, listening to laughter drifting faintly from the windows behind her. And for one long moment, standing there in the dark, she let herself feel every bit of the six years she'd spent trying to earn a place in a family that had already decided, long before she ever arrived, that she didn't belong in it.
Then she reached into her coat pocket and closed her hand around a small brass compass, its glass still faintly scratched from a dock sale thirty years earlier, and something in her went very still. Not defeated; something closer to resolved.