The Diary of an Unloved Wife novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Locks

I zoomed in on the picture until it blurred.

There was the little burn on the headboard where I'd once leaned a candle too close at sixteen.

It was my bed, in my father's house, in the room I'd slept in since I was a child.

Winslow had given her the keys the day I left.

I called him.

He answered on the first ring.

"Margery."

"Get her out of my house."

"It isn't your house yet. Nothing's final until the judge says so." His voice was easy, almost warm. "Keira needed somewhere to stay, and it was empty. You left."

"I'm coming back for it."

"Are you? I thought you were busy sharing a bathroom with graduate students."

I hung up on him.

On Friday Malachy came into the office with two coffees and put one on my desk without a word.

He'd been doing it all week.

He never asked how I took it, and he never got it wrong.

"You look like you want to bite somebody," he said.

"I need to get to Boston tomorrow."

"Huh." He sat on the edge of his desk. "I'm driving up in the morning. Historical Society, eight boxes of plumbers' union minutes. You want a lift?"

"You're making that up."

"I'm a lot of things, Beacon Hill, but I couldn't make up plumbers' union minutes."

His truck was an old green pickup with a cracked dashboard and a bag of pretzels in the door.

He drove with one wrist on the wheel and talked the whole way about the Fall River line and his sister's terrible husband.

He didn't ask me once why I was going.

On Beacon Hill he slowed down. "Which one?"

"Louisburg Square. The one with the black windows round the back."

When we pulled up, he looked for a long moment at the soot on the back wall and the tape.

He didn't say anything.

A locksmith's van was already waiting at the curb.

I'd booked him from New York on Thursday night.

He was an older man with a toolbox and a thermos, and he looked at my face and didn't ask questions either.

I let myself in with my own key.

The front hall smelled of new paint over old smoke.

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