Chapter 5
Kari
The pillow wall has surrendered.
Not gracefully — nothing about this arrangement is graceful. The bolster has migrated to the foot of the bed. Two pillows are on the floor. And my left hand is resting on Liam's forearm like it belongs there — tracing the cords of muscle, the warmth of skin over tendon.
It does not belong there.
Morning light comes through the curtains in long amber bars. The ceiling fan clicks. Somewhere on the street, Nina is unlocking her shop — the scrape of the deadbolt carries across the quiet like a starting gun.
I extract my hand. Slowly. Like I'm defusing something.
Liam doesn't stir. Or doesn't appear to stir.
His breathing is too even, too controlled, and somewhere in the back of my skull a small voice suggests that a man who runs perimeter checks before dawn is probably not sleeping through direct physical contact.
But that's a thought I'm not entertaining this morning, or any morning, so I file it under things I will never think about again and slide out of bed.
The floorboards creak. Millicent — the hallway wallpaper — watches me pad toward the bathroom. "Don't start," I tell her.
She always starts. Tiny faded roses on a yellowed ground, simultaneously judgmental and smug.
Downstairs, the kitchen smells like coffee.
This is the part that gets me.
Not the coffee itself — I can make my own coffee at hours that would concern a sleep specialist. It's that the coffee is already made.
The pot is full. The mug I used yesterday is on the counter, clean, handle facing the direction I reach from.
And the sticky drawer — the one by the stove that's been requiring a dish towel and an act of faith — slides open on the first pull.
Smooth. Silent. Like it never stuck at all.
My thumbnail goes to my teeth.
The porch step that caught my ankle on Day 1.
Level now. The pantry hinge that squealed every time.
Quiet. The back screen door latch that rattled in the wind at night — the sound that kept jolting me out of half-sleep, heart hammering, certain someone was coming in. Tight now. Flush against the frame.
I never see him do any of it.
He doesn't mention it. Doesn't leave a list, doesn't fish for thanks.
The repairs just appear, like the house is healing itself overnight, and if I didn't know better — if I hadn't caught the faint scratch of a multi-tool against hardware past midnight — I'd think Margit's ghost was finally getting around to the maintenance she'd been ignoring.
The coffee is strong and slightly bitter, which is exactly how I make it. He noticed.
I pour a cup and stand at the kitchen window. Gary stares back from his post in the front garden bed. "Morning, Gary." His expression suggests he has opinions about my sleeping arrangements.
The oven timer in my head clicks on. My hands need a project. And my kitchen has a working oven, three kinds of flour, and a butter supply that could feed a small nation.
Banana bread first. Then blueberry muffins, because there's a pint in the fridge that won't last another day.
Then brown butter snickerdoodles, because the butter is already out and the rhythm of measuring and mixing and folding is the only thing between me and the low hum of anxiety that lives in my ribs these days.
By mid-morning, the kitchen looks like a bakery had a breakdown. Cooling racks cover every surface. Flour dusts the counter, the floor, my overalls, and somehow the inside of my left ear.
Liam appears in the doorway. Fresh dark henley — or the same dark henley, washed. The distinction seems irrelevant because the effect is identical — looking at the kitchen like he's assessing a crime scene.
"You've been busy," he says.
"The bananas were going bad."
His gaze tracks across the muffins, the cookies, the banana bread.
"All of this. For the bananas."
"Once you start, you can't really stop. Momentum. Physics."
He picks up a snickerdoodle. Examines it with the same focused attention he gives window latches. Takes a bite. His jaw works. Something shifts in his expression — not a smile, but the granite softens by a fraction.
"These are good," he says. Like it costs him something.
My chest does a small, traitorous thing that I refuse to name.
"Take the plate to Oren. And there's banana bread for Nina."
He picks up both deliveries without a word and heads for the front door — this man who carries deadbolt kits in his truck — holding a plate of snickerdoodles like evidence he's been assigned to transport.
The hardware store trip is my idea. Patricia has sanded the dining room baseboards to splinters. Walt's has the quarter-round I need, and I want crown molding samples for the parlor.
Liam drives. His truck smells like leather and cedar.
My hands are in my lap. His are on the wheel.
He takes a route that adds a block, and when I open my mouth to tell him he's going the wrong way, the words dissolve because his eyes are tracking windows and sightlines. He's not lost. He's clearing the route.
Walt's bell chimes. Sawdust and machine oil — the scent that makes my shoulders drop.
"Kari! Quarter-round?"
"And crown molding samples. The parlor's ready."
Walt spots Liam. "Brought the boyfriend."
"Brought the boyfriend." The word doesn't stumble this time. That's concerning.
Liam's hand settles on the small of my back.
Not for the cover. Not because Walt is watching. His palm lands against the dip of my spine — warm, steady, certain — and my entire nervous system forgets the script.
My breath catches. Low in my throat. The kind that doesn't make a sound but rearranges everything behind the ribs.
His hand is on my back the way it would be if this were real, and for three full seconds I forget it isn't.
"Crown molding's in the back," Walt says.
I walk. Liam's hand drops. The absence burns.
In the molding aisle, I grab a sample. "Three-inch cove. Classic. Won't fight the medallion."
He examines it with quiet intensity. "Good profile."
"Thank you for your professional assessment of crown molding."
The corner of his mouth twitches. A rumor of a smile.
We pay. We leave. His hand does not return to the small of my back, and I am furious about this in a way that makes no sense.
Oren's pot roast fills the entire block.
The smell hits halfway down the sidewalk — rich, dark, heavy with garlic and something herbed that has no business smelling that good through closed windows.
His front door is propped open with a boot that has seen better decades, and the man himself stands in his kitchen in an apron that says KISS THE COOK, stirring a pot the size of a small bathtub.
"Sit," he tells us.
The dining table is set for three. Cloth napkins. Real plates. A bottle of red breathing.
Oren serves without asking about portions. Pot roast in generous slabs, root vegetables, gravy that took most of the day.
"Margit loved pot roast," he says.
The name lands in the room like a stone in still water.
"She'd come over every week. Same chair you're in, Kari. Same napkin — she had one she liked, the blue one with the stitching. Forty years of Sunday dinners."
His voice is even, but his hands — thick, scarred across the knuckles — grip his wine glass a beat too long.
"She was tough," he says. "You know that, Kari — you got it from her side. That woman could stare down a contractor and make a city inspector cry. But the last year — "
He stops.
"Something changed. She got quiet. Margit was never quiet.
She had opinions about everything — the paint on my shutters, the state of my hedges, Nina's menu.
And then she just stopped. Pulled the curtains.
Stopped coming to dinner. I'd knock and she'd open the door halfway, like she was checking who was behind me. "
Liam's stillness has shifted — relaxed to alert in a way that's invisible unless you've spent days calibrating yourself to his body language. Which I have.
"She got notes," Oren says. "Told me about them once, after a glass too many. Someone leaving her messages. Telling her to sell, to get out." He rubs the back of his neck. "I told her it was probably kids."
The pot roast sits in my stomach like a stone.
"It wasn't kids," I say.
"No. Whole block knows now — Halcyon Ridge Development. They've been buying up properties on this street for a couple years. Quiet-like. Cash offers, above market. Picked off the rentals first, then the ones with owners who didn't have the energy to fight."
"Margit didn't sell," Liam says.
"Margit told them to go to hell." A ghost of a smile. "Direct quote. She said the Foxglove had been in her family since before the developers' grandparents were born, and she'd burn it down before she'd hand it to someone who'd turn it into condos."
My throat tightens.
"And then the notes started," Liam says.
Oren nods. "And she got scared. Margit — who I never saw scared of a damn thing in forty years — started locking her doors and checking her windows and calling me at odd hours to ask if I'd seen anyone on the street."
"I should have taken it more seriously." His voice is rough now, scraped to something raw. "I should have pushed. Called the police myself. She died in that house. Alone. And I was two doors down telling myself it was kids."
The silence has a physical weight.
"Do you know who runs Halcyon Ridge?" Liam asks. His voice is level, but under the table, his knee has shifted toward mine. Not touching. Just closer.
"Nobody does. Shell companies and post office boxes. You can't pin down who's making the offers because there's no face behind them. Just letters on nice stationery and phone calls from numbers that don't call back."
The walk home is quiet. Not the comfortable quiet of the routine we've built. This quiet has teeth.
My hands are shoved in my pockets and the pot roast sits in my stomach alongside something heavier — something that tastes like inheritance.
Same paper. Same block letters. Same message, different words.
Margit's notes. My notes. The same hand. The same campaign. Someone who wanted Margit out of the Foxglove badly enough to frighten an old woman into locking her doors and dying alone.
And now they want me out too.
"Kari." Liam's voice. Close. We're on the front walk, and I don't remember the last two blocks.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You haven't spoken since we left."
"I'm processing. People process quietly sometimes."
He opens the front door — his deadbolt, his key — and waits for me to walk in first. The foyer smells like the banana bread I left on the counter, sweet and warm and so aggressively normal that something cracks behind my sternum.
I'm halfway up the stairs before my throat opens.
"She was my family." The words come out thin. Stripped. "My great-aunt. The only person on my mother's side who ever treated me like I was permanent. And someone terrorized her in her own home and nobody — "
My voice breaks. I grip the banister. The wood is solid under my hand — old-growth oak, the kind that holds.
Liam is on the step below me. Not crowding. Not reaching. Just there, the way the banister is there. Structural.
"I want to know who they are," I say.
"I'll find out."
"Margit kept a record of everything. Receipts, correspondence, property records. If someone sent her threatening notes, she kept them. If Halcyon Ridge made her an offer, she kept the letter."
"Where would she store those files?"
"The attic. She had a fireproof filing cabinet up there. She always said the attic was the only room in the house that minded its own business."
Liam looks up the stairs toward the attic access. Then back at me. Gray eyes steady — not warm, not cold, just present. The way a wall is present when you lean against it.
"Tomorrow," he says. "We'll go through the attic together."
"Tonight."
"Tomorrow. You're running on adrenaline and pot roast and whatever you baked at dawn, and the attic isn't going anywhere."
He's right. I hate that he's right. My hands are shaking.
"Fine. Tomorrow."
I climb the rest of the stairs. The bedroom is the same — brass bed, yellow flowers, the ruins of the pillow wall piled at the foot. I don't rebuild it. The pretense feels small next to what Oren told us tonight.
Liam follows a few minutes later. Takes his side. The mattress dips. The ceiling fan clicks.
"Liam."
"Yeah."
"Whatever happened to Margit — whoever did this — they're still here. They're still doing it. To me."
"I know."
"And they're going to find out that I'm not leaving."
Somewhere outside, a car passes. The streetlight throws long shadows across the yellow bedspread.
"No," he says. Quiet. Final. "You're not."
Sleep comes faster than it should, given what I know now. But the deadbolt holds. The man between me and the door is awake. And tomorrow, I'm going into Margit's attic to find out who tried to take this house from her.
And then I'm going to make sure they never take it from me.