The House Where The Lights Went Out

Chapter One

Winona

The trick to a quiet marriage, Winona had learned, was making peace with the sound of your own thoughts.

She stood at the kitchen window at six forty-five in the morning, holding a mug of coffee she hadn't tasted yet, watching the oak tree at the back of the yard drop the last of its November leaves.

The tree was nearly bare. She had watched it go bare every year for four years, and she was not sure whether that felt like rootedness or like counting down.

Townes had left at five-thirty. She knew because she had not been asleep when he left—she was rarely asleep anymore when he left—and she had lain in the dark listening to the specific sound his dress shoes made on the hardwood of the hallway, that measured, unhurried rhythm, and she had thought, I don't know what is happening inside that man.

Not the way she used to. Not the way a wife of four years should.

She set the coffee down and picked up her phone.

No message from him. There had been a time, early in the marriage, when he texted her from the car, small things, Traffic on the bridge.

Thinking of you. Or just her name, which he had a particular way of typing—Win—as though he were already mid-sentence with her in his head.

She had those messages still. She had not looked at them in a long time because looking at them felt like pressing a bruise.

Winona Carrington was thirty-four years old, a landscape architect with her own firm, a woman her friends described as formidable and her mother described as difficult.

She did not consider herself difficult. She considered herself precise.

She knew what she wanted. She had wanted Townes Carrington from the first moment she saw him at a charity auction six years ago, standing apart from the crowd with the specific stillness of a man who did not need to perform himself for a room.

She had wanted him with the clear-eyed certainty she brought to everything, this. This one.

And she had him. He was hers. He had been hers for four years, and she did not take that lightly even now, even in the cold kitchen with the bare oak and the untasted coffee and the silence that had stretched between them for—she tried to count backward and gave up.

Long enough that she had stopped noticing where the silence began and where she did.

That was the most frightening thing, actually. Not the distance. The numbness.

She raised the coffee, made herself drink it. Outside, a cardinal landed in the oak tree, brilliant and out of place. She watched it for a moment, then went to get dressed.

The Carrington house was a 1920s Colonial on the east side of the city, wide-porch and tall-windowed, the kind of house that looked like it contained a busy, warm life.

When she and Townes had bought it, it had contained exactly that, dinner parties, friends sprawled across the living room floor, a shared renovation project that had involved arguments and laughter and Townes on a ladder with plaster in his hair, grinning down at her with that rare, transformative smile.

They had painted the bedroom together. Deep slate blue, because she had wanted it and he had said then that's what it'll be and meant it.

The bedroom was still slate blue. It was very beautiful and very quiet.

She dressed for a site visit, layering for the cold, and as she pulled on her jacket she caught her reflection in the mirror on the back of the closet door.

She looked fine. She looked, in fact, exactly like the woman she was, composed, well-dressed, not visibly diminished.

She studied herself the way she studied anything that concerned her—directly, without flinching.

When did you stop fighting for it? she asked herself.

Her reflection did not have a good answer.

She grabbed her bag and her keys and went out into the morning.

She didn't see Townes until nearly nine that night.

He came in while she was at the drafting table in her home office, deep in a planting plan for a commercial atrium, and he paused in the doorway the way he always did—as though checking whether he was welcome. She hated that pause. She hated that it had become necessary.

"Hey," he said quietly.

"Hey." She did not look up immediately. This was a habit she had developed, the slightly delayed acknowledgment, and she was not proud of it.

When she did look up, the sight of him still registered somewhere beneath the numbness, tall, dark-haired, jaw carrying the shadow of a long day, his tie loosened. Tired around the eyes.

She wondered when she had started seeing his tiredness as something held against her rather than something she wanted to soothe.

"Good day?" she asked.

"Complicated." He came in and sat in the armchair in the corner, which was what he did when he wanted to be near her without interrupting. It had once been her favorite thing he did. "Yours?"

"Productive." She turned back to the plans. "There's pasta on the stove."

"I ate at the office."

She nodded. She had suspected as much, which was why she had made pasta instead of anything that required coordination—something she could eat alone without it feeling like a statement. She had become expert at making arrangements that didn't require him to show up.

The silence settled over them like a familiar blanket. Not hostile. Just—present.

"Townes," she pleaded, after a while.

"Yeah."

She had been going to say something. She had been building toward something, some version of I need us to talk about what's happening or I feel like I've lost you or even just I miss you, which was the truest thing.

But the moment she opened her mouth, the architecture of it—the years of swallowed sentences, the careful management of her own longing—made the words feel impossible.

"Nothing," she sighed. "Goodnight."

He looked at her for a moment. She felt it without meeting it. Then he told her "Goodnight, Win" quietly, and left the room.

She put her pencil down and stared at the planting plan until the lines blurred.