I had been in the cottage for less than twelve hours when my mother called to tell me she was moving in. My name is Victoria, and at thirty-four years old I had finally bought something that belonged to absolutely no one but me. It was a small weathered cottage on the North Carolina coast, two modest bedrooms, a leaky front gutter that dripped when the sea mist rolled in, and more unfiltered quiet than I had experienced in my entire adult life.
The yellow kitchen cabinets had been painted by the previous owner by hand, slightly chipped at the corners and imperfect in the particular way of things made with care rather than precision. I loved them more than I had loved any object I had ever owned. I had spent the decade before this buying other people’s peace of mind.
As a senior compliance auditor for a large healthcare conglomerate, my daily routine involved tearing through thousands of pages of fraudulent insurance claims, hunting down ghost patients, and locating the exact missing decimal that proved someone was lying. I was paid very well to look at a room full of smiling executives and tell them with documented evidence that their math was garbage. I was very good at it.
I was so good at organizing other people’s chaos that I had failed to notice my own life becoming a hostage situation. The cottage was my escape. I had quit my job, sold my city apartment, and liquidated my investment portfolio.
I paid for the cottage entirely in cash, because I knew that if I left the money accessible, my mother would eventually locate an emergency large enough to drain it. When the real estate attorney handed me the deed, it had exactly one name on it. I was not going to allow a second name to accumulate.
That afternoon I had hauled the last box inside and sat down in the faded wicker chair on the silverwood porch to watch the sky turn a bruised purple over the sound. I fell asleep sitting up. When I woke, the coffee beside me was cold and the house was dark, and I felt a profound, physical peace that I did not recognize at first because I had gone so long without it.
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