Denise found herself too distraught about what happened. She was in the clear. If Robert’s body were found, nobody could prove that she had killed him. There had been no witnesses at the Bluffs that Tuesday evening. And everybody they knew thought they were a happy couple, so who would ever suspect the conflict between them?
“I’m not really guilty of anything. After all, he tried to kill me and I only tried to defend myself. I have a right to do so and keep myself from harm,” Denise would tell herself out loud when she was alone. Did she really believe this or was she rationalizing? This was something that only Denise really knew.
She did not, however, want to continue with a career that put her in the public eye. She wanted to keep a low profile. Indeed, with the discovery of her husband’s treachery, she could no longer live in the condo. Quitting her job, selling their condo, she packed her bags, gathered all her money and possessions, and set off to drive to London where her classmate in journalism school, Suzanne, had offered her a job in her public relations firm.
Denise was ruminating about all this as she stared at the Bluffs one last time before turning back to her car. The Bluffs were at the end of the road leading to the empty hole. But she did not intend for the Bluffs to be the end of her road. And she did not intend to end up in the empty hole. She was going to get back on the road that she had travelled on before her marriage to Robert and jumpstart her life again. Now the road stretched far out ahead and her new future was in sight.
Denise exited Toronto, driving along the Lakeshore Road. Eventually she drove over the bridge above the Humber River. Gigantic trees covered the top of the bridge, forming a leafy canopy that seemed to project from what had become the cold, cruel world. Denise would later call the bridge the watershed connecting her past, her present, and her future.
As she left Lakeshore Boulevard, drove onto the Gardiner Expressway and onto the 401, Denise felt content to live in the present. The road became her escape from the past and her doorway into her future. On the road she felt those precious moments when her mind went silent and she could see everything and hear every sound around her. She took everything in and in doing so she knew that she was alive and had a future. The road had thrown her a nasty curve, but she was not going to let that empty black hole be the end of the road. She was going to take that road to her new life and her new future. Travelling the road made her feel alive. And indeed, she was alive.
