10. Nora
— ? —
Nora
Today is the day I died.
The staff has been walking on eggshells since morning. Even Brielle - usually sharp, usually commanding - has retreated to her room with a headache that I suspect has more to do with last night’s fight than with any migraine.
Adrian has been in the garden since noon.
I watch him from the kitchen window, pretending to prepare Lily’s lunch while he sits on the stone bench beneath the oak tree.
He has a bottle in his hand. Whiskey, from the color of it.
He’s been drinking steadily, methodically, the way a man drinks when he’s trying to drown something that won’t go under.
“He did this last year too,” the cook tells me, following my gaze. “Sits out there all day. Doesn’t eat. Barely talks.”
“Grief is hard.”
“Is that what you’d call it?” She makes a noise that’s almost a laugh. “I’ve worked in a lot of houses, Miss Eve. Seen a lot of grieving husbands. Most of them don’t look like they’re trying to crawl out of their own skin.”
She goes back to her work. I keep watching.
Around six o’clock, Brielle appears in the kitchen. She’s wearing all black. Mourning clothes, I realize, the kind of deliberate statement that makes my stomach turn. Playing the grieving widow when she’s the one who helped put me in that river.
“I’m going to my sister’s for the evening,” she announces. “Mr. Walker needs space today. Make sure Lily’s asleep by eight. And-” She pauses, looking at me with something unreadable in her eyes. “Keep an eye on him. He gets… unstable. On this day.”
“Of course, Mrs. Walker.”
She leaves. The house goes quiet.
There’s a cake in the refrigerator. I found it this morning behind the milk - store-bought, white, LILY in pink gel letters, bought by the cook and hidden like contraband, because nobody in this house has said the other thing today.
My daughter turns six on the day her mother died, and every year the grief eats the birthday whole. Two years old, this arrangement. Last year’s candles never left the box.
So before bed, in the kitchen, with the house holding its breath around Adrian’s whiskey, I cut two slices and put six candles on hers.
“It’s not a party,” I tell her when her eyes go wide. “It’s a fact. You were born today, and somebody should say so out loud.”
She blows them out in one try. She doesn’t tell me her wish. She doesn’t have to. She’s looking right at me when she makes it.
Lily is easy to put to bed. She’s learned to sense when the adults in her life need her to be small and quiet, and tonight she folds herself into her blankets without a single complaint.
“Is Daddy okay?” she asks as I turn off her lamp.
“He’s having a sad day, sweetheart.”
“Because of my real mommy?”
My throat closes. “Yes. Because of her.”
“I have sad days too.” She pulls her stuffed bear closer. “But nobody asks me if I’m okay.”
“I’m asking you now.”
She thinks about this for a long moment. “I’m okay most of the time. But sometimes, when I smell the scarf, I remember her voice. Not her face. Just her voice, telling me stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Princess stories. About a girl who lived in a garden and talked to the roses.” She yawns. “She used to say the roses would protect me. Even when she couldn’t.”
I can’t speak. Can’t breathe. Those were my stories. The ones I made up on summer afternoons, sitting in the very garden where Adrian is currently drowning himself in whiskey.
“Go to sleep, sweetheart.” I bend down and press a kiss to her forehead - risking it, not caring. “The roses are still protecting you.”
“I know,” she mumbles, eyes already closing. “That’s why I tell them secrets.”
***
Adrian is still in the garden.
The bottle is empty now. He’s sitting with his head in his hands, the posture of a man who’s given up trying to hold himself together.
I should go back to my cottage. I should wait for Theo’s call, stick to the plan we’ve been building for the past week. I should keep my distance, gather my evidence, stay invisible.
Instead, I walk outside.
“Mr. Walker.” My voice cuts through the evening quiet. “You should come inside. It’s getting cold.”
He doesn’t look up. “Is that an order, Eve?”
“A suggestion.”
“I don’t take suggestions.” He finally raises his head, and his eyes are red-rimmed, bloodshot, devastated. “Not today. Today I drink in the garden where my wife used to laugh, and I remember all the ways I destroyed her.”
My lungs forget their job for a second.
“You’re being hard on yourself.”
“Am I?” He laughs, and the sound is ugly. “You don’t know anything about me, Eve. You don’t know what I did. What I didn’t do. The choices I made that I can’t ever-”
He stops. Stares at me.
I’ve come too close. Sat down on the bench beside him without realizing it, drawn in by his words like a moth to flame.
And there’s a horrible, humming wrongness to how close we’re sitting - my husband, my widower, drunk on my death anniversary, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off his arm.
Part of me wants to lean away. Part of me, some old muscle memory that hasn’t gotten the news, wants to put my head on his shoulder the way I did for years.
I hate that part. I sit very still and let it starve.
“That you can’t ever what?”
“Nothing.” He tries to pull himself together. Fails. “I’m drunk. I’m rambling. You should go back inside.”
“Tell me.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to say it.” I keep my voice steady, my face neutral. “Whatever it is. You need to say it out loud.”
He looks at me for a long moment. In his eyes, I can see the war: the part of him that wants to confess fighting the part that’s spent two years building walls around the truth.
“Everyone thinks grief is missing someone,” he finally says. “It’s not. It’s the thing you did that you can’t ever-”
“Can’t ever what?” I keep my voice soft. Nothing. A feather on the scale.
He turns the bottle in his hands. Watches the whiskey climb the glass walls and fall back.
“Do you know what rain sounds like on a river?” he says instead.
“Everyone thinks they know. They’re thinking of rain on a roof.
Rain on a car. It’s not the same.” He takes a long pull straight from the bottle.
“Rain on a river sounds like applause. Like a whole theater applauding, forever, at nothing.”
I know exactly what it sounds like from underneath.
“You were at a river,” I say. “In the rain.”
“I was at a river in the rain.” He laughs, and it’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard him make.
“Everyone knows that part. It was in the papers. Local woman’s car recovered.
Husband devastated.” He drags a hand down his face.
“Devastated. That was the word they picked. I remember thinking - that’s not the word.
There’s no word. There should be a word for a man who-”
He stops.
The garden holds its breath. I hold mine. The whole night leans in.
“For a man who what, Mr. Walker?”
“She made a sound.” It comes out of him in a whisper, like it’s been standing behind his teeth for two years waiting for the door to open.
“That’s the part nobody knows. Everyone thinks it was quiet.
A car goes into the water, and in your head it’s quiet, it’s like a movie, it slips under and it’s done.
” His hands have started to shake around the bottle.
“It wasn’t quiet. The horn was going. The water was - there was so much noise - and underneath all of it, I swear to God, I heard-”
My heart has stopped. I am three feet from the truth and it is walking toward me with its hands out.
“What did you hear?”
“My name.” He looks up at me, and his eyes are two open graves. “I heard her say my name. Or I didn’t. Or I’ve invented it, every night, for two years, because a man who really heard it would have-”
“Would have what?”
“Would have gone in.” His voice drops to nothing. “A man who heard it would have gone in. So either I didn’t hear it, and I’m haunted by something that never happened - or I heard it, and I’m-” The bottle stops halfway to his mouth. “And I’m-”
Say it. My nails are cutting half-moons into my palms. Say it, Adrian. Three more words. Say what you are.
“Sir.” My voice comes out steadier than it has any right to. “What did you do at the river?”
His eyes hold mine. And I watch it happen - I watch the confession climb all the way up his throat, watch it press against the backs of his teeth, watch two years of rot lean into the door-
“Why do you care?” he whispers. “You didn’t know her. Why do you - you stand there in the dark asking questions like you already know the answers. Sometimes when you look at me, I feel like-” His breath catches. “Like I’m being graded.”
“Maybe you are.”
It slips out before I can stop it - too true, too sharp, too much - and something flickers in his drowned eyes, some animal older than the whiskey, and for one terrible second I think he sees-
Headlights sweep the garden wall.
Brielle’s car, turning into the drive.
Adrian flinches like a man caught at something, which is the truest thing he’s done all night.
“Adrian.” Brielle’s voice cuts through the darkness like a knife. “There you are.”
I turn. She’s standing at the edge of the garden, her car still running in the driveway, her eyes fixed on us with an intensity that makes my skin crawl.
“I thought you went to your sister’s,” Adrian says.
“I came back.” She walks toward us, heels sinking into the grass. “I had a feeling you shouldn’t be left alone tonight.”
Her eyes move to me. In them, I see something new - suspicion sharpening into certainty.
“Come inside, darling.” She takes Adrian’s arm, pulling him to his feet. “You’ve had too much to drink. Let the help get back to work.”
He goes with her. He always does. But at the door, Brielle turns back.
“What exactly did my husband tell you?”
I meet her gaze without flinching.
“Nothing, Mrs. Walker. Just grief.”
“Mmm.” She doesn’t believe me. I can see it in the set of her jaw, the calculation behind her eyes. “Well. Grief makes people say strange things. I’m sure whatever you heard won’t leave this garden.”
It’s a warning. A threat.
I smile.
“Of course, Mrs. Walker. Goodnight.”
I walk back to my cottage. Behind me, the door to the main house closes with a sound like a cell door slamming.
Theo is waiting in my cottage when I get back.
He’s sitting in the dark with his elbows on his knees, and the second the door clicks shut he’s on his feet. His silhouette crosses the room before my eyes adjust, and then he’s close enough that I can smell rain on his jacket.
“Two hours.” His voice comes out low and rough, scraped raw. “You sat with him in the dark for two hours.”
“You were watching.”
“I’m always watching.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “It’s the only goddamn thing I’ve been good for in two years.”
He crosses the room until there’s barely a foot of space between us. The air feels thick. Heavy. Like something’s about to break.
“What did he say?”
“He almost confessed.” I pull off my jacket, toss it over a chair, anything to keep my hands busy. “He was three words away, Theo. Three words, and then her headlights hit the wall and he shut down.”
“That’s not what I asked.” His jaw tightens, a muscle jumping beneath the skin. “You sat next to him. On her anniversary. On YOUR anniversary. He was drunk and wrecked and saying your name into a bottle, and you just… sat there. In the dark. With him.”
“I needed the confession.”
“I know what you needed.” He reaches out and takes my wrist, his fingers wrapping around the sleeve where the birthmark hides underneath. His thumb presses down like he’s searching for my pulse. Like he needs proof I’m still here. “I need to hear that it was only the confession.”
The honest answer is complicated. He deserves the honest answer.
“My body remembered him.” I don’t look away, even though I want to. “For about ten seconds. Old wiring, old patterns. I sat still and let it pass.”
Something shifts in his face. Pain, maybe. Or fear. He absorbs it like a blow, steady on his feet, refusing to stagger.
“And now?”
“Now I’m standing in my own kitchen wanting a man who isn’t my husband.” I step closer, erasing the distance between us. “Which should feel wrong. I keep waiting for it to feel wrong.”
“Does it?”
“It feels like the only right thing on this entire property.”
He kisses me.
One hand still wrapped around my wrist, the other sliding into my hair, and there’s nothing gentle about it.
Your husband is drunk in the garden fifty yards away, the careful voice warns. It is the anniversary of your death. There are rules about nights like this. There were rules about rivers too, I tell it, and nobody followed those either.
This is a man staking a claim against a ghost. I let him. I kiss him back just as hard, my fingers curling into his shirt, pulling him closer.
When we finally break apart, his forehead drops to mine. We’re both breathing hard.
“Every time you’re near him,” he says quietly, “I stand at a window like a jealous teenager and hate my best friend a little more.”
“Good.” I fist my hand tighter in his shirt. “Stay jealous. It looks good on you.”
He laughs into my hair, a broken sound that’s half relief and half surrender.
Through the window behind him, across the dark lawn, the light in the master bedroom is still burning.
Brielle is awake. Brielle knows I’m a threat now.
She just doesn’t know what kind.