Chapter 4: The Invoice

They let me go home on Friday.

I did not want to go home, but my clothes and my laptop were there, and so was the bag I had packed for the hospital.

Jenna drove me.

She parked in the driveway behind Dean's car and kept the engine running.

"Ten minutes," she said. "I'll carry the boxes. You point."

The front door was open.

Dean had been standing in the hallway waiting for us.

He looked as if he hadn't slept or changed his shirt since Wednesday.

"Willa. Please. Let me talk."

"No."

I walked past him to the bedroom, and Jenna walked behind me with a stack of flattened boxes.

The nursery door was shut.

I did not open it.

I took my laptop, my sketchbooks and my mother's necklace from the dresser.

I took the hospital bag from the front closet, because I could not stand to leave it where it had been standing for a month.

Then I took the folder with my birth plan out of the kitchen drawer.

It had been moved.

I found it under the dish towels, and the page with my doctor's number had a coffee ring on it.

Dean stood in the kitchen doorway.

"I'm not letting you go."

"You don't get to say that."

"You're in shock. You're not thinking clearly. Gwen says people in grief make decisions they..."

"Don't say her name to me."

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