I told him.
His jaw tightened the same way it had the night he read Evan’s text.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t apologize like this is your fault.”
“His accusation involves me.”
“His cowardice involves him.”
A proud flicker moved through Mark’s eyes.
Then I said what had been growing in me for weeks.
“I want to go home.”
His expression sharpened with concern.
“To the house?”
“Yes.”
“Jessica—”
“I need to see what he did. I need my things. I need to stop being afraid of rooms I paid for.”
He studied me.
“Then you shouldn’t go alone.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
I expected him to offer a driver. A lawyer. A security guard.
Instead, he said, “Tell me when.”
We went the next morning with Denise, her assistant, and a locksmith.
The house looked exactly the same from the outside.
That felt like an insult.
The blue shutters still needed repainting. The porch light still leaned slightly crooked. The hydrangeas I had planted before my diagnosis were brown and sleeping under winter’s last grip.
My key did not work.
Of course.
The locksmith changed that.
Inside, the air smelled wrong.
Not dirty. Not abandoned.
Wrong.
A sharp floral perfume clung to the hallway. Lena’s, I guessed. On the side table where I used to drop grocery receipts, there was a pair of sunglasses that weren’t mine.
In the kitchen, one of my mugs sat in the sink with lipstick on it.
Red.
I stared at it for a long time.
Mark stood behind me, silent.
Denise took photographs.
Every room became evidence.
In the bedroom, my clothes had been shoved into garbage bags and pushed into the closet. Lena’s dress hung on the back of the door. A silver one. Cheap, glittering, young.
Something inside me snapped so quietly no one heard it but me.
I walked to the closet and pulled out the first garbage bag. Then the second. My sweaters tumbled onto the floor. A framed photo of my mother had been wrapped in a bath towel and cracked across the glass.
I picked it up.
My mother’s smiling face split beneath the fracture.
