“Where are they?”
“Inside. Your kitchen. I asked them to sit and wait.”
My kitchen.
I nodded.
“Do you want to go in?” he asked. “You don’t have to. You can stay out here.”
I thought about the woman I’d been for twenty-seven years. The one who would have stayed in the driveway. The one who would have let someone else handle it, then apologized to Mark afterward for the trouble.
“It’s my house,” I said. “I’m going in.”
The side door was propped open with one of their boxes.
KITCHEN, it said in black marker. Mark’s handwriting. I’d have known it anywhere. He’d labeled every box in every move we’d ever made in exactly the same blocky capitals.
I stepped over it.
My kitchen looked like a stranger’s. Their boxes were stacked against the wall I’d been planning to paint sage green. Vanessa’s brass lamp stood on my counter, next to my coffee maker. Mark’s leather recliner—the one he’d insisted on keeping in the divorce—sat in the middle of my living room, angled toward the television they’d mounted on a stand in front of my fireplace.
