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She winds her way through an obscene amount of boxes and other detritus that has ended up in this room—dusty lampshades, empty frames, multiple jars of coins, stacks of old phone books, a sewing machine with a floor pedal. It’s like an episode of Antiques Roadshow threw up everywhere. Simone can’t even discern the original purpose of the room, but it’s clearly been a de facto storage space since man set foot on the moon. She’ll start her search in the ornate armoire that takes up almost one whole wall, even if she already accepts it’s likely a lost cause. The yearbooks are probably in Poppy’s locked study, the most private and forbidden of all the private spaces in the house, but it’s worth a shot.

As soon as she throws open the double doors of the armoire, she discovers a treasure trove of vintage dresses that makes her gasp. It’s like she’s accessed a portal to a French atelier circa 1952. Gown after gown made by Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, and other high-end designers she’s barely heard of. She’s confronted by ruffles the size of a dinner plate, at least a half dozen different forms of lace, and an array of pastels that call to mind a seaside watercolor. They must have all belonged to Carole. Alex’s grandmother was a tiny, birdlike woman who Simone only knows from pictures she’s seen, and as much as she might want to play dress-up in these sartorial treasures, there’s no way she could wrestle a single garment past her thighs. Which is just as well, Poppy would likely be furious at the idea of Simone wearing his dead wife’s dresses, especially in her current state—covered in a sheen of sweat after just a few minutes in this small room that the steam radiators have heated to a temperature just a degree or two below hell itself. She settles for running the back of her hand over a swath of taffeta so shiny she can practically see her reflection.

Impulsively, she pulls out a jade dress made of layers of delicate chiffon she knows her mom would love and puts it aside to give to her when she comes for Thanksgiving. Yes, Poppy will probably be horrified by this too, but she’s willing to bet he has no idea how many and which dresses are up here. Simone doubts he’s even opened this armoire since, well, man set foot on the moon.

It’s very possible Poppy believes it’s 1969 right now; it’s been harder and harder for him to follow the date, something Simone asks him about every morning as a test of his lucidity. Do you know what day it is, Poppy? When he answers correctly and with an aggravated huff, she knows it’s a good day. This morning he thought it was Sunday, which explained why he was dressed for church, at least partially—a suit, shirt, tie, and… underwear. Never mind that it’s Tuesday and Poppy hasn’t been to church since his son died.

The sight of her father-in-law’s pale, bony legs extending from loose boxer shorts was something Simone was decidedly not prepared for. Poppy was equally unprepared for her to point out his missing pants. This resulted in a lot of mortified huffing and puffing and complaints about how she was always “showing up out of the blue.” Simone had called fifteen minutes before she’d arrived, and she’d also been here every single morning for the last two weeks like clockwork, to make sure her father-in-law was dressed (appropriately), had his meds, and had eaten breakfast by ten a.m. When he takes his pills even an hour late, he’s more mentally off than usual.

These daily visits are part burden and part joy, the particular kind of joy that comes from being helpful and needed. But they are also unsustainable. Simone is completely out of her depth, caring for Poppy; and she also doesn’t want to feel like the help. Hence the nurse she’s determined to bring on board.

As Simone continues to rifle through the gowns, she listens for Poppy, who she left watching The Price Is Right in the living room. Another sign of his decline; he wouldn’t be caught dead watching that “drivel” in his better days. It’s no use trying to hear anything, though, the house is too big, with too many wings and hidden nooks. Alex’s friends used to tease him that it looked like the house from The Addams Family with its mahogany panels, heavy drapes and dim lighting, the actual stuffed animal heads gracing more than one room, the jarring echoes that come out of nowhere that Langston is convinced are actual ghosts.

Simone has explained that the sounds are coming from the radiators, and even showed him a YouTube video that did a much better job of describing heating mechanics, but he remains unpersuaded that the house isn’t haunted. Admittedly, Simone’s reassurances may have fallen short because every time she experiences a full-body chill from an unexplained draft hitting the back of her neck or swears she hears whispering around corners, she worries that Langston could be onto something.

For Simone, however, this house reminds her less of the one in The Addams Family and more of a depressing Victorian-era orphanage where the kids were dressed in tattered rags and ate gruel. She hates to think of Alex as a child here, spending so much time alone, wandering the dark, echoing hallways.

Simone also hates the idea of having Thanksgiving here in a few weeks, but it’s inevitable given Poppy’s health. The doctors say he needs the comfort of familiar surroundings and routines to stave off further decline, so spending the day as they usually did, at her and Alex’s, seems ill-advised. She tries to picture her mom puttering around Poppy’s kitchen, trying to wash six pounds of greens in the pale-blue sink and finding the spice rack woefully understocked, then sitting awkwardly at the twelve-person formal dining table under the watchful, glassy eyes of a taxidermied grizzly.

Simone is already on edge enough every time Donette and Poppy are in the same room. It’s only happened a handful of times since their first strained introduction, when Poppy invited Simone, Donette, and Alex for a “meet the parents” dinner at his club. Poppy was exceedingly gracious to Donette, an effort her mother found “showy.” When mother and daughter escaped for a bathroom break before dessert was served, Donette sucked her teeth in the stuffy ladies’ room, grumbling about how she didn’t need some old white man to tell her she’d raised an “impressive” daughter. When Simone dared try to defend Poppy and point out that he was just offering a compliment, Donette said, “I don’t need that man giving me some patronizing gold star for my parenting, like he’s all surprised you have good sense and know which fork to use.” This commentary was loud enough to draw eyes from two blond women pretending to wash their hands and trying very hard not to make eye contact with each other. At that point, Simone decided to save her breath. Her mother has many wonderful qualities, but serenity isn’t one of them. Her perpetual indignation is a badge of honor and a defining personality trait. It’s not personal. Or so Simone went to great pains to make clear to Alex when he’d expressed his doubts about how the evening went.

Her mother doesn’t care too much for Alex either. She makes an effort to hide it, but it’s impossible for Donette to hide much. Simone has never been able to tell if her mother’s skepticism is because Alex is white, or rich, or that he tries too hard around Donette. Or maybe it’s because her mother has always had such a soft spot for Kwame. Simone will never know where Donette’s low-key disapproval comes from, because that would require acknowledging it. She consoles herself that Alex can’t read her mother like she can and so he believes he’s as much the beloved son-in-law as Donette puts on that he is.

The radiator behind Simone suddenly clangs loudly enough to send her jumping. She’s been so on edge lately. A hazard of keeping secrets, she supposes. Guilt can make you as unsettled as ghosts can. Not that her lunch with Kwame was a secret exactly, she just didn’t feel the need to stress Alex out by mentioning it. He was already so distracted. So when he offhandedly asked her about the panel when she’d returned from Chicago, she’d replied, “It was great, nothing much to report.” The omission rolled off her tongue without her thinking about it, and then it was too late to correct it. Alex wasn’t listening anyway. He was busy stabbing at his phone in the dark.

She’d then tried unsuccessfully to pull him away from his midnight emails with her surest trick, running her hand along the ridge of his hip, grazing the soft tufts of dark hair that rimmed the waistline of his boxers. Sex is usually their quickest way back to each other, and that night in particular she wanted to use her body to say, I’m sorry I just lied, and I’m yours, and What’s going on between us? But Alex rebuffed her seductions. He remains as distant and moody as she’s ever seen him. It wasn’t like her husband to shut her out like this. Simone’s gone back and forth between trying to engage with him and tiptoeing around his rising stress levels. Both approaches were equally exhausting.

She understands Alex is concerned about his grandfather’s declining health. On top of that, taking over an entire company is a major life change, and those don’t tend to bring out the best in people. Simone remembers her own uncharacteristic bout of irritability and wild mood swings when Langston was born and she was thrown into adjusting to motherhood. Talk about a major life change—she went to bed one person, labored for sixteen hours, and transformed into another person, a stranger to her former self and capable of things she never could have imagined. It was like a superhero origin story—she had to adjust to her new powers (and God she felt powerful), but also account for all the new vulnerabilities that came with it.

Add to that the fact that they spent Langston’s first two months in and out of the ICU until the doctors could figure out why her baby boy was having such a hard time getting food down, and the tsunami of postpartum anxiety completely engulfed her.

In those early months of Langston’s life, she snapped at Alex a dozen times a day, like a shaken soda can finally bursting open. She’d recoiled from his touch and succumbed to a simmering, irrational resentment that he was responsible for all the ways her life was suddenly made unrecognizable. By the time Langston turned six months, finally healthy, but still smaller than other kids his age, Simone’s emotional equilibrium had largely returned, along with her familiar, uncomplicated love for her husband, like a lovely vista coming into view after a thick fog burns off. The morning after baby Langston slept for a straight six hours for the very first time, she crawled into Alex’s lap armed with two steaming cups of coffee and contrition. “I know I’ve been a little…” He stopped her with a kiss before she could finish her apology. A kiss that said, We’re allowed to not be our best selves all the time, but we’ll still love each other.

So Simone is trying to cut Alex some slack. She bit her tongue so hard she almost drew blood this morning when Alex lost his shit watching her open a package from Saks at breakfast. “Jesus, Simone, don’t you have enough coats?” That Alex even cared about her ordering a coat, let alone raised his voice about it, threw her. Simone was annoyed at his anger, and even more annoyed at this framing of the conversation, the implication that she was some sort of spoiled trophy wife princess recklessly spending her husband’s hard-earned money. When, in fact, Simone was the frugal one, thanks to a lifetime of having to adhere to a modest budget, a concept that her husband never needed to learn. Before he headed to the office, she’d asked him for about the tenth time in forty-eight hours if he was okay, and he spat out, “I’m fine,” in a tone that was so far off from the words, it was as convincing as someone insisting the ocean is pink.

Simone’s frustration with Alex spills over to an irritation with the task before her, even though she’s the one who put herself up to it. She has a column to work on and she needs to grab groceries before picking Langston up from school. She has no time to solve mysteries or sort this junk into massive piles of keep, toss, donate. Though the crate of vintage toys—colorful Transformers, Matchbox cars, a tattered Uno deck—that catch her eye just then are most definitely a keep. They must be Alex’s old ones. Langston would love to have these fun relics and, unlike with the dresses, she feels well within her rights to swipe these for her son.

She leans into the closet to try to wrench the crate from all the junk that surrounds it, and in doing so a shoebox comes crashing down. The box is from Goldmann’s, the department store, and Simone expects a pair of faded silk kitten heels to come tumbling out. Instead, it’s a packet of letters bound with a thinning rubber band. Love letters! Carole and Poppy did live apart when she moved to Germany early in their marriage to be with her ailing father in his final months. It’s possible they wrote to each other during that time.

The ink is faded and the handwriting is hard to read, but it appears to be the old-school delicate cursive of a woman. The envelopes are addressed to Larry at a PO Box, though, and the return address is Marjorie O’Neil in a town called Fredonia. So, not from Carole at all, which only increases Simone’s certainty that she should not be looking at them. But Lord, the temptation is strong. As strong as the urge to look the very minute someone tells you not to. Holding the packet up to the light to try to see through the envelopes is as far as she will allow her curiosity to go.

“What the hell are you doing?” Poppy’s standing in the doorway, his face beet red, his hands clenched into fists. “Why are you snooping through my things?” The glassy look in his eyes tells her this is one of the moments he doesn’t recognize her.

Simone slowly makes her way to him, tucking the letters under her arm.

“Where did you get those, Reba? I should fire you, poking around like this!”

Who the hell is Reba? And fire her? So not only does Simone feel like the help, a confused Poppy apparently thinks she is the help.

“Poppy. It’s me, Simone, remember? Alex’s wife. I came to check on you.” State the facts, lay them out, make him remember. What else had the doctor said to do?

“You need to mind your business you… you… little bitch!” Poppy takes three fast steps toward her and then lunges for the paper. Before she realizes what’s happening, he trips over a box and crumples to a heap on the floor.

CHAPTER EIGHT ALEX

Bronco’s reeks of fryer oil and stale beer. The sour scent is probably clinging to the shirt Simone just picked up from the dry cleaners, which will call for dousing himself with the Tom Ford cologne he keeps in his desk drawer when he gets back to the office. The aroma may point to something untoward, but Alex tells himself what he’s doing right now is totally aboveboard. Executives have a couple of cocktails at lunch. They fortify themselves to go back to the office and face the next problem. He watched Poppy do it for years, strolling out of work for a martini or two and coming back sharper, steadier, ready to bark orders and get shit done. If it worked for his grandfather… it’s as good a strategy as Alex has at the moment. The second whisky goes down fast and easy, giving him plenty of time for a third. Alex hates social media. He always experiences a sick sort of emotional hangover after taking in everyone’s breakfasts and vacations and tragic news and dance crazes. But he forces himself to open Instagram today for the first time in months because he’s been meaning to leave a message on Dexter’s account. He hadn’t called him while he was alive, hadn’t checked in, hadn’t so much as “liked” a photo of his two little kids, but the least he can do is offer some meager condolences now. Someone turned Dex’s account into a de facto memorial—probably his mom, given the photo selection—and there’s Dex in a suit and tie from back in high school, with poetry graphics chock-full of clouds and flowers. It was stupid and pointless to write some lame words like, You’ll be missed, Dex, but it’s 2025 and that’s how the world works. So that’s what Alex does.

He debates if a broken heart emoji is cheesy, and finally just adds it before scrolling on almost without even really meaning to. He wishes he hadn’t when, four swipes later, up pops a picture of Simone. But it’s not from her feed, it’s from Medill’s account; she’s tagged, and since they’re friends on the app, this must be why it’s showing up on his feed. Or could be it’s the universe sending him a message. Because right next to his beautiful wife sitting on a stage looking so poised, staring at her like a lovesick puppy is… Kwame fucking Walker.