Chapter 13 #2
The first hour is fine. I wash dishes. I wrap Oren's bread in foil.
I wipe down the counters and do all the small domestic things that make a house feel lived-in rather than occupied.
Gary watches from the front garden bed through the window, his chipped nose catching the late light.
His unsettling smile looks less cheerful today. More like a warning.
"Don't start," I tell him through the glass.
The second hour is less fine. Every sound is louder without Liam.
The pipes clank, and I don't answer them.
A branch scrapes the east side of the house, and my whole body goes rigid.
The east side. The blind spot. The gap in the cameras that the stalker knows about because the stalker knows everything.
I sit on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and my phone in my hand. Reese should be here. Liam said twenty minutes. It's been longer than that.
My phone stays silent. The house stays loud.
I go upstairs. Liam told me to stay off the ground floor, and for once in my stubborn, contrary, sunshine-as-armor life, I listen.
The hallway is dim. The baseboard I was sanding with Patricia sits half-finished, a strip of raw wood glowing pale against the dark floor.
I pass it without stopping. Pass the bathroom with the grout I was going to fix.
Pass the linen closet where Margit's quilts are stacked in neat, musty rows.
The bedroom door is closed. I turn the handle. Push it open.
The room is the same. The yellow bedspread. The window with its new lock, curtains drawn the way Liam left them. His bag in the corner, zipped but not packed. Evidence of staying.
I take one step inside and stop.
There's something on the pillow. My pillow—the left one, closer to the window, the one I sleep on every night. The one I was sleeping on last night while his arm was around my waist.
My body understands before my brain does. My feet stop moving. My hands go cold. The breath I just took stays trapped in my lungs, and for a long, terrible moment, I am perfectly still in the doorway of my own bedroom, staring at something that shouldn't be there.
It's a photograph. Glossy. The same kind as the one that appeared under the front door—same finish, same size. But this one isn't a picture of me on the porch.
It's a gravestone. Gray granite, simple inscription. Margit Engstrom. The dates. The epitaph I've never visited because the grave is in a town I've never been to.
Below the photograph, a slip of paper. Handwritten. Block capitals. The same cheap notebook paper as the very first note, the one I found under the contact paper near the kitchen sink on the day I arrived.
SHE WOULDN'T LEAVE EITHER.
My knees don't buckle. My vision doesn't blur. I don't scream or cry or sink to the floor. I stand in the doorway with my hands shaking and my jaw clenched and my eyes dry, and I look at the photograph of my great-aunt's grave on the pillow where I sleep, and I think: They were in this room.
While the cameras were running. While the deadbolt was thrown and the pin locks were set. Someone walked into the Foxglove, climbed the stairs, opened this door, crossed this room, and placed a photograph on my pillow.
On my pillow. Not the counter. Not the parlor floor. Not the front porch. My pillow. The place where my head rests. The place where Liam's hand finds my hair in the dark.
They were in the room where we sleep together, and they chose the side of the bed that's mine.
I take my phone out of my pocket. My thumb finds Liam's name. I don't hesitate. I don't tell myself to handle it. I don't reach for the sunshine or the stubborn independence or the Margit-inherited refusal to be moved.
I press call.
He picks up on the first ring. "Kari."
"I'm upstairs." My voice is steady. My hands are not. I watch them tremble around the phone—both hands, gripping it like it's the only solid thing left in this house. "I'm in the bedroom. There's something on my pillow."
A beat. I hear the shift in his breathing. The sound of a car. He's driving.
"Is Reese there?"
"No. He never showed up."
"Don't touch it."
"I'm not." My voice stays level. Calm. Controlled. "It's a photograph. Margit's headstone. There's a note. Block capitals, same paper as the first ones."
"What does it say?"
I read it to him. My voice doesn't crack. My hands shake so badly the phone nearly slips, and I press it harder against my ear, holding it there with both palms.
"I'm on my way," he says. Something in his voice has gone very quiet. Not calm—the opposite of calm. The dangerous stillness of a man who is choosing his words because the ones he wants to say would scare me more than the photograph. "Twenty minutes. Don't move. Don't go downstairs. Don't—"
"I know."
"Kari."
"I know."
I sink down against the doorframe. Not into the room—I can't go in there, can't cross the threshold into the space that was mine and is now contaminated with the proof that nowhere in this house belongs to me anymore.
I sit on the hallway floor with my back against the frame and the bedroom door open in front of me and the photograph visible on the pillow, a small white rectangle on the cheerful yellow flowers.
She wouldn't leave either.
Margit is dead. Del said it, and I brushed it off, because acknowledging it meant acknowledging what it implied. But the note isn't implying. The note is stating. Margit wouldn't leave, and Margit is dead, and I won't leave, and—
The sentence ends there. I won't finish it.
The Foxglove creaks around me, old bones settling in the fading light.
I press my phone against my chest and wait for the sound of Liam's boots on the porch.
My hands won't stop shaking. I wrap my arms around my knees, tuck the phone between my ribs and my thigh, press my trembling fingers against my shins until the pressure gives them something to do besides fall apart.
I'm not leaving. I'm still not leaving. But for the first time since I pulled up to Sycamore Lane with Bernadette riding shotgun and a deed to a house I'd never seen—for the first time, I'm afraid the choice might not be mine.