Chapter 1

My husband had a six-year-old daughter.

I learned that because a contractor asked whether I wanted her name carved into the door of the blue room.

At first, I thought I had misunderstood him. I was sitting in my car outside a grocery store, one hand on the steering wheel and the other around a paper cup of coffee that had gone cold thirty minutes earlier.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Whose name?"

The man on the phone cleared his throat. "Sophie Cole's, Mrs. Cole. Mr. Cole said she prefers cursive. We need your approval before we send the plaque to the engraver."

For a moment, the parking lot became strangely silent. Cars moved. Shopping carts clicked across concrete. Somewhere behind me, a child laughed.

Ethan and I had no children.

Not because we had never tried.

We had tried three times. Three rounds of IVF. Three different calendars marked with injections, blood draws, appointments, and the cautious kind of hope that makes you afraid to buy anything small enough to fit in a drawer.

After the first failed transfer, Ethan held my hand in the recovery room and said we still had time. After the second,

he drove me to the coast and told me we could build a life that did not depend on a nursery. After the third,

when I told him I could not go back to another clinic, he cried into my hair.

"We are already a family," he had said.

The contractor was waiting.

"What address are you at?" I asked.

"Eighteen Bay Road."

Our house.

The house Ethan and I had bought two years earlier. The house I had spent nine months restoring,

room by room, after years of saving drawings and samples from my preservation work.

The blue room at the end of the hall had been filled with unopened boxes and travel cases.

Ethan had suggested turning it into a reading room once we were ready to look at the future without bitterness.

"Is my husband there?" I asked.

"He left about half an hour ago," the contractor said. "He said you knew about the work."

Two hours earlier, Ethan had texted me that he was meeting Grant at the bank to discuss our refinance.

I drove home without calling him.

A contractor's van stood in the driveway. Upstairs, the door to the blue room was open. The walls had been painted the color of a clear morning sky. On the floor were childproof window latches,

a pink lamp, and an unopened bed frame.

A work order sat on the windowsill.

Project: Sophie's Room.

I took a picture.

Ethan came home after eleven that night. He kissed my forehead, loosened his tie, and told me Grant had been impossible about the numbers.

The next morning, he set a navy folder beside my breakfast plate.

"Just the final bank documents," he said. "They only need your signature."

I looked at the pen he had placed beside the folder.

Then I thought about the blue room.

And I understood that whatever Ethan had built behind my back, he needed my name to finish it.