Chapter 13
Kari
The paint goes on smooth. That's the thing about fresh coats—they don't care what's underneath. Plaster, scars, your name carved in jagged letters by someone who was standing in your parlor while you slept one floor above. The paint just covers it all with the same patient blue-gray.
"There you go," I tell the wall. "Good as new."
The wall doesn't answer. Millicent, the surviving wallpaper on the opposite side, offers no commentary either.
Even the house seems to be holding its breath, and I hate that.
The Foxglove used to breathe—creaking floorboards like sighs, pipes groaning their good mornings.
Now every sound is a question I don't want to ask.
I load the roller again. Smooth, even strokes. I refinished three rooms before Liam showed up and turned my renovation project into a crime scene. I can paint a wall.
The trick is not looking at the spot where the letters were.
The primer covered them. The first coat sealed them.
This second coat will erase them entirely.
Then I'll stand here and admire my work and absolutely not think about the fact that someone stood in this exact spot with something sharp while I was upstairs in bed.
I tap my thumbnail against my teeth. Stop it. Roll.
The morning light comes through the parlor windows all golden and generous, the way it always does.
I used to love this light. I used to stand in this room and think this is mine with a fierceness that surprised me, because I've never been possessive about anything.
Not the apartment I shared with my ex. Not the career I built and then watched dissolve like sugar in hot water when the agency restructured.
But the Foxglove—Margit's Foxglove—I claimed this house the way you claim a stray cat. Not because I deserved it but because it needed someone.
The roller runs dry. I reload it, and a drop of paint lands on my shoe. My shoe that I put on this morning in the bedroom that Liam and I share. The bedroom with the yellow bedspread and the window he finally locked and the pillow wall that stopped existing days ago.
"You're getting a third coat," I inform the wall. "Don't argue."
I finish the second coat and step back. Clean, blue-gray, unblemished. No one would know. And that's worse, somehow—that the evidence can be erased so easily. That someone can violate your home and all it takes is a trip to the hardware store and forty-five minutes with a roller.
The banana bread is already in the oven. I started it before the painting, because I am a woman who has her priorities in the correct order, and those priorities are: cover the damage, feed someone, fall apart later. Preferably never.
Liam is in the kitchen when I come in to wash the roller. He's on the phone—low voice, clipped sentences, the operative cadence I've learned to recognize. His back is to me, but his shoulders carry a tension that wasn't there a week ago. Now they're a barometer I check more often than the weather.
He hangs up and turns. Those gray eyes sweep over me—paint on my hands, on my shoe, a streak on my forearm I didn't notice.
"Wall's done," I say, brighter than I feel. The sunshine is a performance now. I know it. He probably knows it too.
"Kari—"
"It needed a second coat anyway. The first one was uneven. I was going to redo it before—" I gesture vaguely. Before someone carved my name into it like a promise. "Before."
His jaw does the thing. The micro-clench that means he wants to say something he's decided I don't need to hear.
"The bread's almost done," I say. "Banana walnut. I'm bringing a loaf to Oren."
"I'll walk you over."
"I know."
We look at each other across the kitchen—the kitchen where a chair was repositioned to face the front door, where a letter offered me money for my home, where the morning light falls on the counter like nothing has changed. Everything has changed. I just refuse to let it show.
My phone rings while I'm pulling the bread from the oven. Del's name on the screen. I wedge it between my ear and shoulder, both hands occupied with the loaf pan and a dish towel.
"Tell me you're packing."
"Good morning to you too, Delaney."
"Don't Delaney me. I called Nina. She told me about the wall."
I set the bread on the cooling rack. The kitchen smells like warm banana and brown sugar, and for one second—one brief, stupid second—it smells like safety. "The wall is fixed. I painted it this morning. Three coats."
"Kari." Del's voice drops into the register she reserves for serious conversations and bad Yelp reviews. "Someone broke into your house."
"They didn't break in. They—" I stop. What's the better word? "The cameras didn't catch anything."
"That's worse. That means whoever it is knows where the cameras are. This isn't notes anymore. Someone stood in your house in the middle of the night and carved your name into a wall."
I tap my thumbnail against my teeth. "I'm aware."
"Then come stay with me. A week. Two weeks. Let Liam and his people handle it."
The thing about Del is that she's never wrong. She was right about my ex. She was right about the event planning agency. She was right when she said you need to go see that house after Margit's lawyer called.
And she might be right about this.
The thought lands in my chest like something heavy and cold.
I might need to leave. I might need to pack a bag, lock the door, drive away from Sycamore Lane.
From the parlor with its freshly painted wall.
The kitchen where I've stress-baked enough banana bread to feed the block.
The bedroom with the yellow bedspread and the man in it.
The fact that I'm considering it—even for a second—makes something hot and sharp rise in my throat.
"Margit didn't leave," I say.
The silence on Del's end is heavy.
"She got notes too. Oren told me. She got threatening notes, and she stayed. She stayed because this was her home, and some developer with shell companies and rotating suits doesn't get to decide—"
"Kari." Del's voice is quiet now. Gentle in a way that scares me more than the shouting. "Margit is dead."
The kitchen is very still. The bread is cooling. The oven ticks. Somewhere in the house, a pipe groans, and I don't talk back to it.
"I'm not leaving," I say. My voice comes out steady, which is a miracle of engineering. "But I hear you. Okay? I hear you."
"Promise me you'll think about it."
"I promise I'll think about it."
I won't. But I'll let her believe I will, because that's what love looks like sometimes—letting people believe the thing that lets them sleep.
The afternoon unspools in the way afternoons do now—half domestic, half surveillance.
Liam checks the camera feeds on his phone.
I sand a section of baseboard in the upstairs hallway with Patricia, who whirs gamely despite the tension.
Liam brings me water without being asked.
I make sandwiches without being asked. We orbit each other in the Foxglove's narrow hallways, and every time we pass, his hand finds the small of my back. Brief. Warm. A checkpoint.
We don't talk about the wall. We don't talk about Del's phone call or the dead bird he thinks I don't know about.
We talk about the baseboard. The grout in the upstairs bathroom.
Whether Oren's coffee cake is better than Nina's drip brew, which is a question with no correct answer and therefore the safest possible conversation.
Almost normal. Except for the way Liam's gaze tracks to the windows every few minutes. Except for the way I flinch at a car door on the street, then pretend I didn't.
Except for the fact that I'm wearing my own shirt instead of his henley, and we both know why, and neither of us says it.
We're in the kitchen—me at the counter slicing bread for Oren's loaf, Liam leaning against the doorframe—when his phone buzzes differently.
Not the steady pulse of a text. A sharp, insistent vibration that makes his whole body change.
Spine straight. Jaw set. Eyes going flat in a way I've only seen twice.
"What is it?"
He reads the screen. Something shifts behind his eyes—a calculation, a decision.
"Line 13," he says.
I don't know all of HPG's protocols. I know enough. Line 13 means an emergency that pulls resources. Line 13 means Liam has to go.
"How long?"
"I don't know." He pushes off the doorframe, already moving. "Reese is on standby. I'll have him here in—"
"Go."
He stops. Looks at me. Those gray eyes are doing something complicated. He doesn't want to leave. The not-wanting is written in every line of him—the set of his shoulders, the way his hand tightens around his phone, the scar on his forearm catching the light as his muscles tense.
"I'll call Reese on the way. He can be here in twenty minutes. Don't—"
"Open the door, leave the house, answer the phone if it's a number I don't recognize, engage with anyone on the porch, or touch the cameras. I know." I put the bread knife down. Cross the kitchen. Stand in front of him. "Go do your job."
His hand comes up and cups the side of my face. Thumb against my cheekbone. Not a movie gesture—rough, almost desperate, like he's memorizing the shape of my jaw.
"Lock the deadbolt behind me. The pin locks are set. Stay off the ground floor."
"Liam."
"Stay off the ground floor."
"I will."
He kisses me. Not soft, not sweet—hard and fast, the kind of kiss that says I'll be back and I'm sorry in the same breath. Then he's gone, boots on the hardwood, front door opening and closing, and I'm standing in the kitchen with bread crumbs on my fingers and the taste of him on my mouth.
I turn the deadbolt. Check it. Check it again.
"Just us," I tell the house.
The Foxglove creaks. I choose to believe it's agreement, because the alternative is that this house has stopped talking to me, and that's a loss I can't afford right now.