Chapter 2

When I pulled into the alley behind Wren House, the kitchen light was still on.

Nolan had replaced that bulb a month earlier, joking that I kept the house as if my mother still lived there.

Five years ago, before our wedding, a storm had torn two panels from the flower shop roof. Nolan stayed outside with me until midnight, holding a tarp in place while rain ran down both our faces. The next morning, he came back with tools before I even asked.

My mother had watched him from the kitchen window and told me, “Keep the man who knows that loving a house means helping to protect what happened inside it.”

For a long time, I believed I had.

Now warm light leaked through the curtains as though someone had come home before I had.

I sat in the car, saved the restaurant photos to a new folder, and emailed them to myself. It did not mean I was ready for divorce.

It meant Nolan no longer got to decide what counted as a misunderstanding.

The front door was unlocked, but the living room was empty.

White roses Nolan had bought that afternoon sat on the dining table beside a card.

Five Years, Still Us.

I turned the card facedown and went straight to the sideboard.

My mother’s blue wren napkins had always been divided into two stacks of six.

I counted them one by one. There were eight left. The missing four were not in the laundry basket or the kitchen drawers.

I opened the lowest cabinet. Inside were my mother’s holiday plates. One of them had a dried smear of pink frosting along the rim.

Nolan did not eat strawberry cake.

Before I could photograph it, the lock turned.

“Ava?” he called from the entryway, his voice carrying that practiced, tired ease. “You’re home?”

I stood and slipped my phone facedown into my palm.

He came into the kitchen with his tie loosened and a paper bag in his hand—the pasta from the place I liked.

When he saw the roses, he gave me a small, apologetic smile.

“The client dinner ran late,” he said. “I know today matters to you.”

“Did you eat?” I asked.

He blinked, as if he had not expected me to sound so calm. “A little. Why?”

“Nothing.” I looked at him. “Did you come home at all tonight?”

His fingers tightened around the paper bag. “No. I was out the whole time. Why would you ask that?”

The answer came too quickly. He did not leave himself any room to think.

Until then, I had still been making excuses. But he had shut the door before I even told him what I had found.

“A few napkins are missing from the sideboard,” I said.

He frowned, impatience slipping into his voice. “Ava, they’re old pieces of linen. You haven’t been sleeping well. Don’t work yourself up over this.”

That hurt more than the lie.

No questions came.

His first instinct was to reduce my concern into grief and return me to the role of the wife who could always be soothed.

I nodded and took the bag from him. “Go shower. I’ll heat this up.”

Nolan watched me for a moment, as if making sure the interruption had passed. Then he kissed my forehead and went upstairs.

At one in the morning, I sat alone in the dark living room, listening to his steady breathing above me.

On my phone screen, the blue wren rested beside Claire’s plate.

Near dawn, an unmarked white pickup pulled up in front of the flower shop.

A man stepped out with surveying equipment over his shoulder and walked straight into the garden where my mother had grown roses for thirty years.