Page 6 of Blindsided
“You didn’t give up everything,” she says firmly. “You’re still you. That brilliant, stubborn woman I’ve known forever is still in there. The one who graduated top of our class in college and had three job offers before graduation.”
Her words hit me like a splash of cold water. She’s right. I’m still me. Somewhere beneath the perfect wife Mark wanted me to be, the real Kori is still there.
“Can you meet me?” I ask, suddenly not wanting to be alone with my thoughts.
“Come to my place. I’ll make tea,” she responds without hesitation.
I take a deep breath, feeling something shift inside me. The pain is still there, raw and throbbing, but alongside it is something else. Something that feels like freedom.
A half hour later, I’m at Jen’s apartment, my eyes red-rimmed but finally dry. She hands me a mug of tea that I accept gratefully, wrapping my fingers around its warmth.
“You need to get away,” she says decisively. “From this whole situation. Give yourself space to think.”
I nod, staring into my tea. “I can’t go home. Not yet.”
“What about Wavecrest?” Jen suggests sitting beside me on her sofa. “My family’s old cottage in Ireland? Nobody will find you there.”
I blink, memories of the quaint stone cottagenear the Irish coast flooding back. Jen’s family had taken me there once during college break. It was remote, peaceful—exactly what I need right now.
“Ireland?” I whisper, the idea taking root. “That’s... actually perfect.”
“The keys are in my desk drawer. No one’s been there in months, but Mrs. O’Malley from the village still checks on it weekly. The place is yours as long as you need.”
My mind races with logistics. “My passport is at home. In the safe.”
Jen’s eyes narrow. “When will Mark be home?”
I check my watch. “Not for another three hours. He was finalizing some big merger before the party.”
“Then we have time,” she says, already grabbing her car keys. “We’ll get your passport and whatever else you need. Pack light—you can buy whatever you need there.”
As we drive to my house—no, Mark’s house now—I feel oddly detached, like I’m watching someone else’s life unravel. The suburban streets look different somehow, as if the betrayal has altered even the physical landscape around me.
“What about work?” Jen asks as we turn onto my street.
I laugh, the sound hollow. “What work? I’ve been playing housewife for four years.”
“You know what I mean,” she says gently. “What will you do for money?”
The question jolts me back to reality. “I have my own savings account. He doesn’t know about it.” A small act of rebellion I’d maintained, squirreling away birthday money, Christmas bonuses from when I still worked, and skimming money from the monthly budget he gave me. Not much, but enough to buy time. “I can e-transfer it to you, and then if I need any, you can wire it to me?” I say as we get out of the car. She nods as we head towards the garage. I flip open the key panel and enter the code. As we wait for the door to open, I feel that at any moment, Mark will come barreling in the driveway. His 1954 Ferrari 250 GTO gleams under the overhead lights—a $70 million trophy he polishes every Sunday morning while I make his breakfast.
As I make my way through the garage, behind me comes the unmistakable sound of metal dragging across metal. I turn to find Jen standing beside the car, keys dangling from her fingers.
“Ooops. My hand slipped,” she says, not looking remotely sorry.
I shot her a watery smile as I squeezed her arm. The four-inch gash along the driver’s side door says everything I can’t.
“Come on.” She throws her arm over my shoulder, and together we walk to the door that leads into a mud room. Inside, the house greets me with itsmuseum-like perfection. Every surface gleams in the lamplight, while every pillow sits at the exact angle Mark prefers. I’d half-expected to find some evidence of their affair strewn about, but of course not—Lana had been with me all morning, and Mark would never risk disrupting his carefully curated world.
“I’ll keep watch,” Jen says, positioning herself by the front window. “You pack.”
I move through the house on autopilot, grabbing essentials. Passport from the safe. Some underwear and a few days' worth of clean clothes. My laptop. The flash drive with all my important documents. The diamond earrings my grandmother left me—the ones Mark always said were “too old-fashioned” for me to wear.
In the bathroom, I pause, staring at my reflection. I hardly recognize myself. When did I start wearing my hair this way? When did I begin choosing clothes in the muted colors Mark preferred? My closet is filled with beige, cream, and pale pink. I don’t even like pink— but it was the ‘sophisticated palette’ he’d called it.
On impulse, I grab the scissors from the drawer and cut a chunk of my carefully maintained hair. It falls to the sink, a physical manifestation of breaking free. I keep cutting until my long hair becomes a choppy, uneven mess. It’s terrible, but it’s mine. I grab the reddest lipstick I own —the one healways griped about, saying it looked trashy — and pull the cap off.
The crimson glides across my lips, staining them with defiance. I stare at my reflection—wild-eyed, choppy-haired, red-lipped—and suddenly feel more alive than I have in years. This woman looking back at me isn’t Mark’s perfectly curated wife. She’s someone new. Someone dangerous.
