Chapter Eleven
Two days later, Lakshmi calls while Diana microwaves leftovers in the library’s break room.
“Diana, did you hire a house cleaner?” Lakshmi’s voice, typically calm and soothing, is frantic.
“Is this about my house’s messiness? Lax, I get that enough from my mom; I can’t believe you’re starting in on me.” Diana laughs as she removes her turkey meatloaf from the microwave and douses it with sriracha.
“Did you hire a house cleaner?” Lakshmi repeats.
Diana stills. “Why are you asking me this?”
“There’s someone in your house. I was at my easel and saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was a person walking into your backyard. They were there for less than a minute before they went around to the front and unlocked the door.”
Diana stills. Someone is in her house? Her breathing starts to hitch, and a lightheadedness fills her body. There’s a pounding in her ears, and she wonders if this is the start of a panic attack.
“Should I call the police?” Lakshmi gasps. “Wait—the person’s in the kitchen. I’m calling the police.”
“No,” Diana says. That one word comes out twisted, as if her body has figured out what she’s about to say next and protests her decision. “Don’t call the police. I’m coming home.” She runs from the room.
“You’re coming home? Why? To confront this person? That’s not safe.”
Diana grabs her keys and bag from her office. “Lax, listen to me, we’re going to hang up, and you’re going to record everything you see. Can you do that?”
“You think this is the person from Tom’s letter?” Lakshmi says, fear shading her words.
“No matter who it is, video will be helpful. Can you do that? Record what you see?” Diana forgoes the elevator for the stairs, nearly leaping between the landings. “Or take photos, whatever is easier. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
On the drive home, Diana hits every green light.
She clenches her jaw to keep her molars from grinding against one another, all the while thinking of the conversation she had with Jonathan.
She asked him about bringing Tom’s letter to the police, and he warned her from doing so.
You’d have to contend with people snooping around your life, Tom’s life.
You don’t want that. Not for you, not for the kids.
She’s sure he’d change his advice if he knew there was an intruder in her house.
Bringing in the police now would be the logical, smart decision.
But if this intruder has anything to do with Tom, having law enforcement involved would only make getting answers about his past more difficult. She has to handle this herself.
When she pulls into her driveway, Lakshmi paces in her front yard. The front door to Diana’s house is wide open.
“What happened?” Diana asks, as she throws herself from the car.
“I’m so sorry,” Lakshmi says. She wears fuzzy slippers and her painting apron, the thick canvas stained with the colors of the rainbow.
“I couldn’t see the car’s license plate from inside, so I came onto my porch.
They must have spotted me through the window.
They burst out of the house and drove away before I got to them. ”
Diana’s shoulders sag, relief overtaking her adrenaline. She was so focused on getting here that she hadn’t allowed herself to acknowledge her fear. She wanted to talk to this person and get answers, but she’s grateful to avoid a confrontation.
“Did you record everything?”
Lakshmi removes her phone from her apron. “From the second we hung up until they turned the corner down the street. I really think we should call the police, Diana.”
“Let’s see if anything is missing first,” Diana says, leading Lakshmi inside.
The house is eerily quiet, no hums or beeps of overworked appliances, no clanks or hisses from the radiators. If homes could talk, Diana’s would say it was nervous or even scared. Or perhaps she’s projecting her own thoughts. Either way, something is definitely off.
She walks through each room, opening closets and dresser drawers, Lakshmi silently following.
The idea that a stranger walked through her space, poking around and invading her family’s privacy, sets Diana on edge.
She examines every corner of her house with a critical lens.
Her house is tired, she sees. The baseboards are scuffed, paint has chipped away at the corners, and the windows could use a good scrub.
No wonder Lakshmi’s first instinct when she saw that person in her house was to ask if she’d hired a cleaner.
There’s good news, though: Nothing appears to be missing.
The laptop is on the coffee table where she left it last night; her jewelry, including Tom’s wedding ring, is accounted for in the small leather case in her bedside table; and even her secret stash of cash, stuffed in a makeup bag under the bathroom sink, is untouched.
It’s in the kitchen where Diana finds evidence of her uninvited visitor. At first glance, the room is the same as when she hustled Duncan and Phoebe out the door to school only hours earlier.
Then she sees the mug in the sink.
The mug is white, with a photo of Tom hugging the kids printed on its side, and We Love Daddy curved around the rim in green script.
She and the kids gave the mug to Tom the Father’s Day Duncan was five, Phoebe two.
He used it every day, even with a chip in the handle, the result of an unfortunate clash with a frying pan.
After Tom’s death, Diana placed it in the hard-to-reach cabinet above the refrigerator, where it remained until now.
“They’ve been here before,” Diana says.
“Why do you think that?” Lakshmi says, joining Diana at the sink.
“This mug was up there,” Diana says, pointing to the cabinet, “behind old Tupperware and vases I never use. That person was in the house for about fifteen or twenty minutes, right? How did they know to go into that cabinet, all the way in the back? If they’d been looking to steal money or jewelry, my bedroom was where to start, but they didn’t because everything is where it’s supposed to be. ”
Lakshmi’s eyes widen as she understands what Diana is saying. “They knew where your hidden key was.”
Diana thought of that as soon as Lakshmi said the intruder went into her backyard. Under the deck is a fake stone that hides a backup key to the house. She placed it there herself when she and Tom first moved in.
“Or maybe it was a lucky guess?” Lakshmi continues. “Lots of people have hidden keys.”
“Others know about my past,” Diana recites. “After my death, around the time you find this letter, when I hope you’ve moved on from me, they may come into your life.”
“Who knew about your hidden key?”
“Me, you, Ramesh, my parents, Duncan, Andrea, and Evan.” Diana looks up at Lakshmi. “And Tom.”
Lakshmi’s eyes are unblinking. “You think Tom told this person about the key?”
“I have no idea,” Diana says. She loads the mug into the dishwasher.
“Diana, call the police! They can dust that mug for prints. Maybe we can find out who that person was.”
“No police. Or at least not yet.” Diana shuts the dishwasher. “Let’s look at your video.”
Lakshmi’s recording starts when the intruder passes by the dining room window, reappearing in the kitchen. Neither angle provides much detail. “Their hair is tucked under a beanie, and they’re wearing big sunglasses. Maybe the person is five feet tall or so,” Lakshmi says. “I think it’s a woman.”
“They could be male,” Diana says, zooming in on the figure in the window.
“I’m confident it’s a woman,” Lakshmi says. “There’s something about the way she carries herself that says female, though I guess you’re right. It could be a man or even a teenager.”
The video turns jerky as Lakshmi walks through her house and onto her porch.
She centers her phone on the car parked in front of Diana’s.
“The car was an older gray sedan. There wasn’t a license plate on the front bumper, so I wanted to see the back.
” Lakshmi points to the screen. “Here’s when I’m spotted. ”
Diana’s front door slams open, and the intruder dashes from the house, their hat pulled down, nearly covering their face.
They wear a tan Carhartt jacket, buttoned up to the chin, jeans, and black sneakers.
The intruder never looks at Lakshmi, not even when she runs down the steps and yells, “Stop, stop! I want to talk to you!” They jump into the car and race down the street, nearly colliding with a van pulling out of the school parking lot.
“You came home a few minutes later,” Lakshmi says. “I’m sorry I didn’t get more.”
“No apologies. This is helpful, Lax. Thank you. It was a big risk.” Diana texts the video to her number and returns Lakshmi’s phone.
“So now we know the people Tom mentioned in his letter are real. They know where my hidden house key is, or was, and they’ve probably been here before.
What were they searching for? That’s the question.
” She again looks around the kitchen, assessing whether anything else is different, and that’s when she sees the empty space on the refrigerator.
A small square next to the ice machine is blank. Typically, Diana’s refrigerator is covered with photos, Phoebe’s drawings, and scribbled grocery lists. In that space should be a snapshot of Tom and the kids, taken on the playground across the street.
This is when Diana understands real terror. Her heart thudding in her chest, she drops to the floor. “Where’s the photo?” She scans under the fridge and along the cabinet kickplate. “The one of Tom and the kids. Did they steal it? A photo of my kids?”
“I don’t see it,” Lakshmi says, crawling into the pantry. “Are you sure Duncan or Phoebe didn’t take it? Maybe it’s in their rooms?”
“The photo was here this morning,” Diana whispers. She smiled at the photo when she returned the milk to the fridge after preparing the kids’ breakfast. “I’m sure it was.”
That night, Diana sleeps on her living room sofa, though “sleep” is a generous interpretation of her actions.
Instead of falling into oblivion, she holds Duncan’s baseball bat in her lap and stares at the front door, where she jammed a kitchen chair under the doorknob as an added safety measure.
It doesn’t offer the assurance she wants, and she jumps at every creak and sigh her house makes.
After her discovery of the missing photo, Diana and Lakshmi looked for the front door key, correctly assuming that the intruder didn’t have a chance to return it to the fake stone before their hasty departure.
It was nowhere to be found. That key is the main reason Diana settles onto her sofa for the night.
The intruder, or anyone they’re affiliated with, could return at any time. Tonight, tomorrow, next week.
How long can someone go without sleep, Diana googles, the light from her phone illuminating the darkened room. After three or four days without sleep, the internet tells her, hallucinations may occur. “If only this was a hallucination,” Diana mutters.
The missing photo plagues her, tapping at the back of her mind like a metronome. She’d gotten so used to that photo on her refrigerator that she barely saw it; now, she struggles to recreate its image in her mind.
The photo had come in one of the condolence cards she received after Tom’s death.
Andrea opened the cards for her, sorting them into piles: cards that arrived with flowers or charitable donations and required a thank-you note; cards that included a story about Tom that Diana might want to read; cards from Tom’s colleagues and clients; and cards from family and friends.
Andrea sent all the necessary acknowledgments, and Diana read the cards only once before letting her sister pack them away.
Andrea separated the photo from the card it came with, hanging it on the refrigerator without explanation.
Diana has no idea who sent it; all she remembers is that the photo was taken on the school playground and captured Duncan and Phoebe on the double swing, with Tom behind them, mid-push.
It must have been taken during a school event and sent to her by a well-meaning parent or neighbor.
She has thousands of photos of Tom and their children, yet this one haunts her.
Was Phoebe laughing? Was her hair down or in a braid?
Was Duncan wearing a red sweatshirt, or had it been blue?
Where had she been when the photo was taken?
And why did the intruder steal it?
She accepts, for the first time since she opened that letter, that her home might not be safe. That perhaps she and her children are not safe either. She’s shocked that her husband left her so vulnerable.
“I really didn’t know him at all,” she whispers, tightening her grip on the bat and staring at her front door.