Chapter 5
ADELAIDE
The trouble began just after noon the next day, in the least dramatic way possible.
Adelaide was standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil on a stove that clicked with the tired hesitation of old appliances when the lights flickered once, steadied, then went out altogether.
The refrigerator gave a low, dying hum and fell silent.
A beat later the house seemed to exhale around her, emptied all at once of its small mechanical noises, and the quiet that followed was different from the quiet she'd grown used to since arriving.
Heavier. Less natural. The stillness of something interrupted rather than something at rest.
She had spent the previous evening and this morning trying to make the house livable.
After Jaxon left the square, she had walked back and stood in the hallway for a long time, and then she had gone upstairs and opened every closet and every drawer until she found what she needed.
Some of her mother's clothes were still there, now folded neatly in the bedroom dresser by the agency after the renter left, smelling faintly of cedar and the lavender sachets her mother had tucked between the layers.
The pants were a little loose in the waist, the pullover shorter in the sleeves than Adelaide would have chosen.
But they were clean, soft and they fit well enough, and putting them on had done something she hadn't anticipated. Standing in the bedroom mirror in her mother's clothes, face scrubbed, hair pulled back, she looked like someone who might actually live in this house. Someone who might stay.
Adelaide had reluctantly turned her phone back on as well.
It came alive with a violence that startled her: twenty-three missed calls, fourteen text messages, two voicemails.
She had not listened to the voicemails. She had read the texts, scrolling through them with a steadiness that surprised her.
The early ones were sharp and demanding.
Answer me. Where are you going. Don't do anything stupid.
The later ones shifted into something more controlled, Grant finding his footing.
I understand you're upset. We need to talk about this properly.
Call me when you're ready. The most recent, sent at six that morning: I'm worried about you.
She had stared at that one longest. Some version of it was probably true.
It was the first message that sounded like a person rather than a strategy.
She had typed I'm fine, sent it, and then turned the phone face down on the counter and left it there.
That morning she had driven to the small supermarket at the edge of town and bought what she needed: milk, bread, eggs, coffee, butter, a bar of soap, a toothbrush.
She had paid with cash from her wallet, carried the bags inside and stocked the kitchen with the minimal inventory of a woman starting from scratch.
She stood without moving, one hand on the edge of the counter, and looked toward the darkened light fixture above the sink as though it might correct itself if she waited long enough.
When it didn't, she set the mug down and walked to the window.
Outside, the neighboring house still held its porch light against the pale gray afternoon, which meant it wasn't the street and wasn't the town and therefore was, unavoidably, hers.
A breath left her that was almost a laugh.
It seemed absurd that after everything else, after the drive and the abruptness of leaving and the unfamiliar weight of being back in this house, she might be undone by something as ordinary as a fuse box.
Adelaide should have known how to fix it.
At some point in childhood, her father had shown her where the electrical panel was, and after he died her mother had managed the house with a competence Adelaide had taken for granted and later mistaken for ordinary.
But ordinary, she was beginning to understand, was often only another word for labor someone else had absorbed on your behalf.
Her mother had changed fuses and bled radiators and patched the leak beneath the bathroom sink with plumber's tape and a wrench she kept in the drawer beside the good tablecloth.
Adelaide had watched her do these things and somehow never learned them, had carried instead the vague assumption that houses simply continued to function, the way marriages did, the way lives did, until the moment they stopped and you stood in the dark realizing you had never bothered to understand the machinery that held them together.
She found the panel in the mudroom off the back hall.
The metal door was stiff on its hinges, and the labels inside were written in her mother's neat, slanted handwriting.
Kitchen. Upstairs hall. Water heater. Adelaide stared at them longer than necessary, caught off guard by the intimacy of those small domestic marks, the blue ink slightly faded, the letters careful in a way that suggested her mother had taken this task seriously even though no one else would ever read what she'd written.
Then she reached for the switch that looked wrong and pushed it back into place.
Nothing happened. She tried again, slower, and stepped back and waited with the foolish patience of someone hoping that effort alone might persuade old systems to cooperate.
The house remained dark.
By the time she made it back to the kitchen, irritation had overtaken helplessness, which was at least easier to hold.
She checked her phone. One bar, then none.
The weak signal she'd been balancing on since arriving had vanished with the power, and with it whatever excuse remained for delaying the practical facts of the situation.
Two new messages from Grant had arrived during the brief window of signal.
The first: We need to discuss this like adults.
The second, sent twenty minutes later: I've cancelled my meetings.
Call me. The cancellation of meetings was meant to communicate severity.
In Grant's world, nothing said this matters louder than the rearrangement of his schedule.
Adelaide looked at the messages and felt the old pull, the reflexive urge to respond, to manage his discomfort, to smooth the situation into something he could process. She put the phone down. The signal was gone anyway. The decision had been made for her, and she was grateful for it.
Now she needed help. The house had likely needed help for years. She just happened to be the one standing inside it when the first demand became impossible to ignore.
There was a hardware shop at the edge of town.
She knew that before the thought fully formed, and with it came the immediate, unwelcome second thought: Jaxon.
She stood very still with the phone in her hand.
The sensible thing would have been to knock on a neighbor's door, call the utility company once signal returned, wait until the problem clarified itself into something less immediate.
But the air inside the house was already beginning to cool, and there was something about standing in the dim kitchen with her mother's house gone suddenly inert around her that made waiting feel less like patience and more like avoidance of the kind she'd promised herself, somewhere on the dark road last night, she was finished with.
So she found her keys, locked the front door, and drove to the shop.
The place looked different in daylight than it had the afternoon before, larger somehow, more settled into itself.
Trucks angled along the gravel lot. Wind chimes hung near the entrance, clinking in the breeze.
Bags of soil and stacked lumber stood in ordered rows beneath the overhang, and through the front windows she could see movement inside: customers drifting between aisles, someone at the counter, the ordinary rhythm of a place fully rooted in the life of the town.
The bell over the door rang when she stepped inside, and the smell hit her before anything else.
Wood. Motor oil. Fertilizer. The faint metallic tang of tools and dust and old concrete floors.
It was a real place in the most immediate sense, and the contrast to the life she'd built elsewhere was so sharp it disoriented her for a second, the way stepping out of an air-conditioned building into summer heat could make the world tilt briefly before the body adjusted.
She froze. Jaxon was behind the counter, bent over a receipt book with a pencil in one hand and a debit terminal in the other.
He looked up at the bell, and whatever neutral expression he'd been wearing shifted when he saw her.
Something more restrained, as though her presence no longer felt improbable, only complicated.
He finished with the customer in front of him while she stood near the door, aware of the divided quality of his attention even though he didn't look at her again until the man had taken his receipt and left.
"Addie," he said.
"I need help."
She hated how vulnerable it sounded the instant the words left her mouth, hated the faint heat that rose in her face, hated that she was standing in his shop in yesterday's clothes asking for something she should have been able to handle herself.
But the alternative was going back to a dark, cooling house and pretending that self-sufficiency meant never admitting when things had broken.
.With what?"
"The power went out at the house. I checked the panel. It didn't fix anything."
Jaxon set down the terminal and came around the counter, picking up a flashlight from a shelf. "You sure it's just the house?"
"The neighbors still have power."
He nodded once, already moving toward the door. "Then it's probably the panel or the line coming in."
Adelaide stayed where she was for half a second. "You're coming yourself?"
He glanced back. "You said you needed help."