The silence that follows their departure is absolute. Just my breathing—ragged, uneven, painful—echoing in the cavernous kitchen with its twelve-foot ceilings and open-concept floor plan designed for entertaining people who never come. Every inhale feels like swallowing broken glass. Every exhale burns.
The Three Calls
I move slowly, carefully, like someone who’s just been in an accident and isn’t sure yet what’s broken. My legs feel unsteady as I make my way down the long hallway past the formal dining room they never use, past the home office with Deacon’s mahogany desk, past the powder room with the chandelier that cost more than my first car. I climb the stairs one at a time, gripping the polished bannister, each step a small victory over the weakness threatening to pull me down.
The guest room—not my room, never my room, always their guest room that I’m borrowing—waits at the end of the upstairs hallway. It’s decorated in shades of white and gray, everything carefully coordinated, everything expensive and cold and utterly impersonal. It looks like a room in a boutique hotel where strangers sleep, not a place where someone actually lives. The mattress is too soft, the kind that costs thousands of dollars and makes my back ache. The temperature is always slightly too cold because Sloan likes to keep the house at sixty-eight degrees and I’m not allowed to adjust the thermostat.
