Chapter 4: Zero

The townhouse was twenty minutes from the park, and Giles drove it without asking me one question.

I showed him my phone at the first red light.

He read the screen, and a muscle moved in his jaw.

"Tell me where it is," he said.

"Dean's house. Our house. Nobody's, now."

He took the next left.

Dean's key was still on my ring.

I let us in and heard the television down the hall, turned low.

"Tillie?"

It was Carol, Dean's mother, in her armchair by the window with her cane across her knees.

She was sixty-one, thin, with white curls and a jaw that had gotten stubborn since the stroke.

For eighteen months I had been the one who got her up, cut her food and drove her to therapy.

"I saw the video," she said. "Someone in the building shared it on the group page. Oh, honey."

I knelt in front of her chair, and she put her good hand on my cheek.

"I'm packing," I said. "I'm sorry. I can't stay."

"I'd throw you out myself if you did." She looked past me at Giles. "Who's the tall one?"

"A friend."

"Hm," Carol said.

Giles gave a small nod, polite and a little lost.

I went down the hall to the bedroom.

The closet door was open.

My dresses hung on the left, where they always had.

On the right, in the space I had kept empty for Dean's winter coats, hung a row of clothes I'd never seen.

Silk blouses. A red wrap dress. A black bra still looped over a hanger.

I pulled one blouse out and looked at the collar.

The tag said Mullaney.

Behind me, Carol's cane tapped on the hardwood.

She had walked the whole hall by herself, which she was not supposed to do.

"She's been here four nights a week since spring," Carol said. "He told me I was napping. I wasn't."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Priced Me at a Penny, So I Married Another from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.