Page 61 of Weight of Guilt

He parked and, before either of them got out, Wren turned to him. “By the way, I meant to mention this earlier, but . . . the spare key to my house is missing.”

“What?” His eyes narrowed with confusion.

She explained what happened yesterday.

Concern rushed through him. “You should have told me.”

“I was going to, but there’s been a lot going on.”

“I’d like to check things out before you go inside.”

“Of course.”

They climbed out, and Wren waved to Christian. “I’ll be back around in a second.”

He nodded.

They both strode toward her cabin.

Nash paused on her porch and told Wren, “Give me five minutes.”

She didn’t argue, but she didn’t sit down either. When he glanced back a minute later, she was in the doorway with her arms crossed, watching him work. This was her safe space—it was Mason’s safe space. He understood her need to protect it.

The cabin was small. A front room with a kitchen along one wall, a hallway, two bedrooms, one bath.

It smelled like coffee and something sweeter underneath—maybe the scent of shampoo Wren carried home with her from the salon.

Signs of the boy were everywhere. Drawings covered the refrigerator two and three deep, held up with magnets shaped like fruit. A soccer ball sat wedged under the end table. There was a stack of library books on the arm of the couch and a plastic dinosaur on the windowsill facing out, like it had been posted there on purpose.

Nash had lived in his rental three weeks. He had a couch, a coffeepot, and a dog.

This was a home. He’d forgotten what one looked like from the inside.

Every interior door was shut. Bathroom, both bedrooms, the closet in the hall. He’d walked through a lot of houses. People didn’t generally live that way.

He checked the windows first. All of them were latched, none of them broken, and there were no scuff marks on the sills. The back door was the same.

Nobody had forced anything. Whoever came in here had walked through a door like they owned it.

“Anything?” Wren asked from the doorway.

“Nothing yet.”

He worked the hallway next. There was a door frame there with pencil marks up the side of it, a dozen of them, each one dated. The lowest ones were low enough that Mason would’ve been barely walking.

Nash moved past it and opened the hall closet.

Towels. A vacuum. A shoebox of Christmas lights.

He shut it again, the way he’d found it

“You keep a tidy house,” he said.

“I keep a house with a seven-year-old in it. That’s not the same as tidy.”

He checked the rest of the house and came up with nothing.

That didn’t make him feel better. Nobody had forced a window or a door, and nothing was gone but a key.