Chapter 6: The Red Door

The Saturday I was supposed to marry Dominic, I woke at five in my aunt's spare room to the sound of her crying on the stairs.

She wasn't crying about the wedding.

She was standing at the front window of the shop in her robe, and she didn't turn around when I came down.

"Don't look," she said. "Go back up."

I looked.

Someone had painted the store door red in the night.

The paint ran in long drips down the glass and onto the step.

Across the middle, in black marker that had caught the streetlight, somebody had written: MURDERER.

My aunt held up her phone with a shaking hand.

Carina had posted at midnight, a photo from the courthouse hallway, our hug caught by the neighborhood paper's camera.

Under it she had written that she was praying for a woman who couldn't forgive her, and for the baby neither of them had been allowed to hold.

Eleven hundred people had liked it.

A hundred and thirty of them had told me, in the comments, that I should be ashamed.

"She was grieving," my aunt said. "That girl lost a brother."

"I know."

"I told the woman from the bakery on Thursday that I was proud of you. She won't look at me now."

I went to the back for a bucket and a scrub brush.

I had never been so grateful for something to do with my hands.

By six the street was empty and gray, and I was on my knees on the step with a rag and a can of paint stripper from our own shelf.

The red came up in streaks and stayed in the grain of the wood.

My eyes were burning from the fumes, and from the other thing, and I scrubbed until I didn't feel the rag at all.

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