"I'll call Reese on the way. He can be here in twenty minutes. Don't?—"
"Open the door, leave the house, answer the phone if it's a number I don't recognize, engage with anyone on the porch, or touch the cameras. I know." I put the bread knife down. Cross the kitchen. Stand in front of him. "Go do your job."
His hand comes up and cups the side of my face. Thumb against my cheekbone. Not a movie gesture—rough, almost desperate, like he's memorizing the shape of my jaw.
"Lock the deadbolt behind me. The pin locks are set. Stay off the ground floor."
"Liam."
"Stay off the ground floor."
"I will."
He kisses me. Not soft, not sweet—hard and fast, the kind of kiss that says I'll be back and I'm sorry in the same breath. Then he's gone, boots on the hardwood, front door opening and closing, and I'm standing in the kitchen with bread crumbs on my fingers and the taste of him on my mouth.
I turn the deadbolt. Check it. Check it again.
"Just us," I tell the house.
The Foxglove creaks. I choose to believe it's agreement, because the alternative is that this house has stopped talking to me, and that's a loss I can't afford right now.
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.
