The Baby Monitor Caught Him, So I Played It at Sunday Dinner novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Both Rowe Boys

Hannelore trimmed her tree on the first Saturday of December, and nobody was excused.

Her house in Kettering smelled of cinnamon and floor wax.

By four o'clock all of us were standing in the front room, holding something breakable.

Papa was on the stepladder with a string of lights and a quiet, steady kind of swearing.

Hannelore directed him from the couch in her church cardigan, with a gold cross on her chest.

The baby sat on her knee in a Santa onesie.

"Higher on the left, Papa."

I was holding a glass icicle and watching the front door.

It opened with a gust of cold, and in came a man with my husband's face.

"Hello, hello," said Davin. "Who died? Why's it so quiet?"

He was laughing before he finished the sentence.

He laughed first, always, and loud, and the whole room tilted toward him.

He was clean-shaven, with an expensive haircut and a white quarter-zip with the company logo.

Jonas stood across the room with a box of ornaments in his arms.

He waited a beat for the laugh to be over before he smiled.

They were the same height and the same build, with the same long jaw.

I had known them for five years, and I could still stop and stare for a second.

Annelise came in behind Davin, in scrubs under her coat, with her brown ponytail coming loose.

She was a school nurse, and she looked like she had run out of patience somewhere around March.

"Little sister," Davin said, and kissed my cheek with a smack. "Look at you. Mother of the year."

"Davin."

"You're still mad I missed Thanksgiving dessert. I was driving to Cincinnati, I swear. Hospital roof. Four hundred thousand dollars of flat roof," Davin said.

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