September 26, Saturday
I SAT down in front of the laptop expecting Warren's usual solo appearance—loosened tie, stack of folders, the jerky movements of a man doing me a favor by showing up at all—so when the screen resolved into two faces instead of one, it took me a full second to understand what I was looking at.
Heidi.
She sat beside him, tucked into the crook of his arm, her hair the kind of effortless blond that costs a great deal of money to look effortless. She smiled at the camera with bright, easy warmth, the distinct brand of pleasant that beautiful young women extend to older women who've gone to seed.
"I thought it made sense to loop Heidi in," Warren said, before I could ask. "She's around the kids so much now, it seemed silly to keep pretending otherwise."
"Hi, Isabel," Heidi said, giving a small wave, her smile never wavering. "I've heard so much about you."
I opened my mouth. Nothing arrived to fill it.
It was the room behind them that finally registered—the headboard, the reading lamp on the nightstand I'd chosen from a catalog eleven years ago, the slant of afternoon light through blinds I'd installed myself.
My bedroom. Correction: my former bedroom.
They were sitting on my bed, propped against pillows that used to be mine. Ugh.
"I moved your clothes into the guest room, by the way," Warren added, conversational, as if reporting on lawn care. "Heidi needed the closet space. Made more sense to consolidate."
I heard Deputy Wells shift near the door, and when I glanced over, he'd turned his face fully toward the wall, giving me total privacy.
The kindness of it should've helped. Instead it only sharpened the humiliation—the fact that a federal marshal now understood, in granular detail, exactly how thoroughly I'd been replaced.
Heat crawled up my neck and settled in my cheeks, and I stared at the small rectangle of my own face in the corner of the screen, trying to find some expression that wasn't devastation.
"That's—" I started, and stalled there, the sentence with nowhere left to go.
"Oh, and I hired a housekeeper," Warren said, moving briskly past whatever I might have said next. "Comes twice a week now. Heidi's not really used to living in clutter, and honestly, the place needed it."
I nodded. I actually nodded, the way you nod at a stranger's small talk in an elevator, some autopilot function taking over where the rest of me had gone quiet.
"That's great," I heard myself say, the words leaving my mouth with no input from whatever part of me still felt things.
Warren smiled, satisfied, the smile of a man closing out a to-do list. "Don't worry about any of it. Everything's under control here."
I kept nodding. I nodded through Heidi's small wave goodbye, nodded through Warren's parting comment about Josh's dentist appointment, nodded straight through the moment the screen went dark and left me staring at my own faint, hollow reflection in the black glass.
I don't know how long I sat there before I became aware of Wells again, still turned toward the wall, giving me space.
I gathered my things slowly, aware of exactly how small I felt, and walked out without trusting myself to say a single word.
Then a quiet voice whispered that I'd done this to myself.