“I don’t know if I still can,” she said, looking at them with fear.
“Just try. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be yours.”
The first days, the notebooks remained closed. She looked at them from a distance as if they were something dangerous. But one morning, I found her at the kitchen table drawing. It was a simple sketch—a cup of coffee, the wisteria growing on the balcony, her hand moving over the paper.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to interrupt. I just poured her coffee in silence and let her create.
When she finished, she showed me the drawing.
“It’s horrible,” she said. “I lost all my technique.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Because it’s yours. Because you did it without anyone telling you how to do it.”
Little by little, she started drawing more, a little more each day. And with every stroke, I saw something in her come back to life.
Meanwhile, I took care of selling the properties. It wasn’t easy. The house was worth a lot of money, but it also carried the weight of everything that had happened there. Every room held a painful memory for Brenda.
A young couple finally bought it. They were having their first baby. They were excited. They made plans about how to decorate the nursery, about the garden where the child would play.
“It’s good,” Brenda said when we signed the papers. “It’s good that that house will have a new story, a happy story.”
The company was more complicated. It was so riddled with debt that almost no one wanted to buy it. Finally, an investor made a low offer, very low, but we accepted it. It wasn’t about making money. It was about closing that chapter.
With the money from the sales, after paying all the remaining debts, a considerable amount was left. I gave it all to Brenda.
“I can’t accept it, Mommy. You lost all your savings to buy those properties.”
“And I would do it a thousand times over. This money is yours. It’s the start of your new life. Use it well.”
“What am I going to do with so much money?”
“Whatever you want. For the first time in your life, the decision is only yours.”
She enrolled in a digital graphic design course. Things had changed a lot since she had studied. Everything was computers now, programs she didn’t know. But she learned fast, as if her brain had been asleep and was finally waking up.
She started taking yoga classes. She said she needed to reconnect with her body after years of treating it like a machine that was only good for working.
She cut her hair—a big change from waist-length to a modern shoulder-length cut. When she came out of the salon, I barely recognized her.
“What do you think?” she asked, touching her hair nervously.
“I think you look beautiful. You look like you.”
She looked at herself in the car mirror.
“Carol hated it when I wore my hair short. She said Robert preferred women with long hair, so I never cut it.”
“And how do you feel now?”
“I feel free.”
During those months, Robert tried to contact her several times. Calls, messages, flowers sent to the apartment. Brenda didn’t respond to anything.
“Aren’t you curious?” I asked her once. “Don’t you want to know what he has to say?”
“No. Because I know exactly what he’s going to say. That he misses me. That he made a mistake. That he wants another chance. But the truth is, he had thousands of chances. Every day for eight years was a chance to treat me well, and he chose not to.”
“What if he really changed?”
“That’s not my problem anymore. Let him change for the next woman. I already did my time.”
Her firmness filled me with pride.
