Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~4 min read
Chapter 27: The Last Week in Chicago
WREN
She gave notice on the lease on a Monday morning.
The building manager, whose name was Gerald and who had been managing the building for fourteen years, looked at her with the expression of someone who had seen people come and go and had notes.
“Texas,” he said.
“Dusty Creek area.”
“For a man.”
“For a life,” she said. “The man is part of it.”
Gerald handed her the form.
She spent the week doing what needed to be done, which was: the practical accounting of five years of living in a Chicago apartment, the packing of what was worth keeping and the releasing of what wasn’t, the specific inventory of a woman who had moved frequently enough that she understood what had stayed and what had been replaced every eighteen months.
What had stayed: the books, which were considerable. Her grandmother’s kitchen table, which she’d had since graduate school and which had good bones. The notebook collection — notebooks she’d filled and kept rather than recycled, which was a habit she’d had since she was sixteen and which had produced, by her count, forty-three volumes. The east-facing lamp that had been in every apartment since she was twenty-three.
She was shipping these.
She was selling everything else.
The apartment, empty of her things, looked like what it was: a place she had been. A good place, a functional place, a place that had housed five years of writing and two relationships that had ended cleanly and the specific restlessness of a person who had not yet found the thing they were looking for.
She stood in the empty living room on a Thursday night and felt — nothing complicated. The satisfaction of a task correctly completed. The particular lightness of a person who has set down something heavy enough that they’d stopped noticing the weight.
Her phone buzzed.
Cole: *how’s the packing.*
She wrote back: *almost done.*
He wrote: *good.*
She wrote: *four days.*
He wrote: *three days twenty-two hours if you’re leaving at nine.*
She looked at that.
She wrote: *you said you weren’t counting.*
He wrote: *I said Ruby was counting. I’m aware of the number.*
She laughed in the empty apartment.
She thought about the time it had taken her to make him laugh, or to get close enough to something like it that the corner of his mouth moved. She thought about collecting the versions of his expression that existed underneath the managed neutral. She thought about how many of those she had and how many there were left to collect.
She thought: a lot.
She thought: I have a lot of time.
Her friend Sadia came to help with the final boxes on Friday. Sadia was a former colleague who had been her closest Chicago friend for three years and who had listened to the ranch story in segments since August.
“Tell me again about the seven seconds,” Sadia said.
“I arrived, got stuck, he watched me, I counted to seven, he finally got out of the truck.”
“And now you’re moving to Texas.”
“To start.”
Sadia handed her a box. “I give it six months before it’s permanent.”
“I give it six months before Ruby tries to move into the creek road house with me.”
“She sounds amazing.”
“She’s eight and she is running the whole operation.” Wren taped the box. “She drew me a diagram of the north field mud.”
“For what purpose.”
“To prepare me. For winter. The mud changes.”
Sadia looked at her.
“You’re happy,” Sadia said. Not with surprise — with the specific quality of someone confirming something they’d been watching develop.
Wren thought about it honestly.
“Yes,” she said.
“Not performing happy?”
“No.” She looked at the boxes, the empty apartment, the east-facing lamp ready for shipping. “The last time I felt this specific about something was the first year of architecture school, when I was building things and seeing them hold weight.” She taped another box. “That’s the feeling. Something holding weight.”
Sadia was quiet for a moment.
“Good,” she said.
“Yes,” Wren said.
She thought: three days, eighteen hours.
She thought: I know exactly where I’m going.
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