Everyone Had a Key but Me novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Rule Two

Gabe unlocked his own front door at six that evening and stepped back.

"After you."

I stood on the mat.

In three years I had never gone through that door ahead of him.

"The lock's new," he said. "The one key is in my hand. Walk in, and I'll close it behind you."

I walked in.

The foyer was bare.

The framed photograph of a laughing boy with a girl's arms around his neck was gone from the wall.

A pale square showed where it had hung.

By the door, the brass hook stood empty.

"I took it down Sunday," Gabe said. "Before we flew home."

"It was a nice picture."

"It was a lie." He put his keys in a glass dish on the table. "I hung it for my mother. I never asked myself who else it hurt."

I walked down the hall.

I had seen the terrace through glass and the long sofa on a phone screen.

I had never seen what was behind the other doors.

The first was a guest room with a made bed and nothing in it.

The second was the same.

The third was a study with a leather desk and a window onto the park.

On the desk sat a photograph of me.

I had been asleep in a hotel bed in the first month, and he had taken it without telling me.

I picked it up.

"You had a picture of me in the one room I couldn't see."

"I looked at it when I was meant to be working." He sounded a little ill. "I didn't think anything. I thought it was mine to keep in a drawer."

"Gabriele."

"I know."

I put it down again.

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