Chapter 4: The Porch

I got out of the car before Soren stopped it.

"Annika, wait," he said.

I didn't.

The cold hit my face and the smell of cut grass from somebody's last mow of the year.

Two neighbors stood on their lawns pretending to rake.

One had her phone up, filming.

I walked up the path I had laid brick by brick, with my hand on the rail I had sanded, and stopped on the second step.

Chloe stood above me with her coffee mug.

It was my mug, the blue one from our honeymoon in Door County.

She had washed her hair.

It smelled like my shampoo.

"You can't be here," she said, very softly.

"It's my house."

"It isn't, Annika. Carter signed the closing papers on Friday."

"He signed with my name."

"He had a power of attorney."

"I was in a cell when I signed it."

She took a sip of coffee and said nothing.

That was Chloe's way.

When she didn't have a lie ready, she let the silence do the lying.

Behind her, two men carried a white sofa through my front door.

It wasn't mine.

I stepped up onto the porch.

She shrank back one step and put a hand to her chest.

"Please don't hurt me," she said, loud enough for the street.

I stopped.

"Hurt you?"

"Everyone's watching," she said. "Don't make it worse for yourself."

There it was.

A girl who had cried in my arms at twelve, when I zipped her into her funeral dress, and told me she would never forgive herself if I ever left her.

I had held her head against my coat for an hour.

I looked at her.

Really looked.

Her face was so pretty and so empty, and I thought, I don't know her at all.

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