Chapter 8 - The Mountain Sanctuary
For the remaining five days of that week, I existed in a world that felt entirely reborn.
I didn't turn my phone back on. I left it sitting in the kitchen drawer, dormant and dark, and surrendered completely to the rhythm of the mountain.
Every morning began the same way: the quiet scrape of the cast-iron door, the arrangement of dry kindling, the strike of a match, and the slow, golden bloom of the fire. I made coffee using a simple French press, watching the morning mist rise out of the hollows below the ridge.
On the third day, I drove my hatchback down the winding gravel road into the historic town of Lexington. The town was peaceful, dusted in snow, wreaths hanging from the lampposts along Main Street. I wandered through an independent bookstore for two hours, smelling old paper and cedar polish, buying three novels simply because the first paragraphs interested me.
I stopped at a small butcher shop and bought two thick pork chops, a tub of homemade apple butter, and fresh sourdough bread. The owner, an older man with gray hair and kind, crinkled eyes behind wire spectacles, chatted with me about the weather forecast while wrapping the meat in butcher paper.
“Staying up on the ridge?” he asked.
“Just for the week,” I said, smiling. “Taking some time to rest.”
“Good for you,” he replied, handing over the package. “World moves too fast this time of year. People spend all their time rushing around trying to buy happiness, forgetting that peace is completely free if you just sit still long enough to let it catch up to you.”
His words stayed with me as I drove back up the mountain.
*Peace is free if you just sit still long enough to let it catch up to you.*
How many years had I spent running? How many hours had I spent driving across the state in blizzards, hauling luggage, scrubbing roasting pans, and calculating rental margins, all in the desperate, pathetic hope that my mother would look at me and say: *“You did a good job, Regina. You made your father proud.”*
She was never going to say that.
Not because I hadn't done a good job, but because satisfaction was the enemy of her control. If she acknowledged my effort, she would have to acknowledge my independence. If she admitted that eleven thousand dollars was a magnificent gift, she would have to admit that she was indebted to her daughter.
Complaining wasn't a reaction to my failure; it was a strategy to keep me on my knees, forever striving, forever paying, forever trying to earn an approval that was designed to stay permanently out of reach.
That evening, I cooked the pork chops in a cast-iron skillet with the apple butter. I ate by the warm glow of the wood stove, listening to an old acoustic jazz record playing through my portable speaker. My dog rested his heavy chin on my knee, his tail giving two slow, contented thumps against the floorboards.
I looked around the small, warm room.
No screaming. No passive-aggressive sighs from the window. No complaints about the temperature, the bedsheets, or the timing of the salad. Just quiet. Pure, clean, holy quiet.
I realized then that I wasn't grieving the loss of my family’s holiday; I was grieving the illusion of the family I had invented in my head to survive my father’s death. The family I was trying to save didn't exist. It had never existed.
There was only a self-absorbed mother who viewed her children as props for her social vanity, a brother who had learned that helplessness was the easiest path to luxury, an aunt who traded familial guilt for room and board, and a younger sister who was only now beginning to see the bars of the cage.
And there was me: the girl who had spent five years paying ransom for hostages who didn't want to leave.
On December thirtieth, I packed my bags, swept the cabin floor, stacked three bundles of dry firewood by the hearth for the next traveler, and locked the front door.
May you like
As I drove down the mountain toward Richmond, the sky was wide and clear, the winter sun blazing like polished silver against the frozen fields. I didn't feel dread. I didn't feel anxiety. For the first time in thirty years, the passenger seat of my car was empty of receipts, empty of guilt, and entirely full of space.
***
