My Husband's Smart House Only Listens to Her novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Hard Week

At her sister's apartment Mara finds the app has listed her as a guest since move-in day, and when she goes back for her things Neil tells the whole street she's having a hard week, until a stranger says her voice was never recorded.

My sister opened her apartment door at eleven at night in her scrubs, took one look at me, and said, "Where's the car?"

"At the shop."

"Where's your husband?"

"At the house," I said. "With his student. She's making herself at home."

Colleen pulled me inside by the sleeve.

She put me in the shower, then in her flannel pajamas, then on her couch under a blanket that smelled like her one-eyed grey cat.

The cat climbed onto my chest and stared at me with his good eye.

"Talk," Colleen said.

I told her everything, in order, from the doorbell to the stew.

When I got to the part about the lock clicking open for Lia, she stopped stirring her tea.

"Three years," she said. "He told you it needed three years to sync."

"He said a few more days. Every time."

"And you believed him."

"He writes the code, Colleen. I figured he knew."

She didn't say anything to that, which was worse than if she had.

I took out my phone and opened the Hearth app for the first time in my life.

It asked for my login, and my login worked.

There was a tab called Household.

Under it, three names.

Neil Pellam, Owner.

Lia Blankenship, Spouse.

Mara Keane, Guest, since move-in day.

I turned the screen around so Colleen could see.

She read it twice, and then she said a word I won't write down.

My phone buzzed in my hand.

It was Neil.

[Come home. You're upset and it's late. We'll talk about the stew.]

A second text came right behind it.

[Lia went home. It's just us. Don't make this bigger than it is.]

"He's good," Colleen said quietly. "He's really good."

I turned the phone face down on the blanket.

I didn't answer, and I didn't sleep.

At eight the next morning, Colleen drove me back to Lark Hollow in her old Subaru.

"I need my scrubs, my laptop, my mother's photo and the folder with the deed," I said. "Then I'm never sleeping in that house again."

"I'll carry the box," she said. "You do the talking."

Neil's SUV was gone from the driveway.

I walked up the path and said, "Hearth, unlock the door."

The lock stayed shut, and the little camera blinked at me.

I rang the bell.

The door opened, and Lia was standing there in my grey cardigan.

It was the one my mother had knitted me the winter before she died.

Her hair was wet from a shower, and she was holding a mug I'd bought at a craft fair.

"Mara," she said warmly. "Hi. Neil asked that you call first."

"That's my cardigan."

She looked down at it.

"Oh. It was on the hook, and I was freezing. I can take it off."

"Take it off, then."

"Of course." She didn't move. "Mara, Neil is worried about you. He said it isn't safe for you to be in the house alone right now."

Across the street, a neighbor in a bathrobe had come out to get the paper and was reading nothing.

Two doors down, a woman had stopped walking her dog.

"It's my house," I said. "Move."

"I really can't."

"Lia." Colleen set the box down. "Get out of that doorway before I move you."

"Please don't," Lia said, and she stepped back and put her hand flat on the door as if she were the one in danger.

Tires hissed on the wet street.

Neil's SUV pulled up at the curb, and he got out with his coffee.

He looked at his own front step, and at the three of us, and at the neighbors.

Then he sighed, the soft, tired sigh of a man who has been patient for a very long time.

"Mara's having a hard week," he said, to the street. "Let's not do this out here, honey."

The woman with the dog nodded at him.

The man in the bathrobe gave him a sympathetic little wave.

"I'm not having a hard week," I said. "You locked me out of my own house."

"The house locked you out, sweetheart," Neil said gently. "You know it does that when you're anxious."

"It has never once opened for me. Not once in three years."

"Noted," Neil said, and took out his phone.

My face went hot.

The neighbors looked at their shoes.

Colleen opened her mouth, and I put a hand on her arm, because every word I said was going to end up on his list.

That was when a door slammed across the street.

A man had climbed out of a grey work van with a ladder rack and a faded logo on the side.

He was tall, with dark hair going grey at the temples and a scar through his left eyebrow.

He crossed the road in the rain with his hands in his jacket pockets, and he did not look at the neighbors once.

He stopped at the edge of the lawn, looking at me.

Neil's coffee cup stopped halfway to his mouth.

"Your voice isn't broken," the man said to me. "Nobody ever recorded it."

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