I pulled into my own driveway and saw strangers moving through my living room. Not strangers, exactly. That would have been simpler.
These were people I had known my entire life, which made it worse — because strangers, at least, have the decency to understand they’re trespassing. The sky that evening was the color of bruised steel, winter arriving early over Oakwood Hills, the kind of cold that makes a neighborhood feel staged and deliberate. Streetlights threw clean cones of yellow light across the pavement.
The house sat back from the road the way I had loved it when I first saw it — a mid-century modern gem of glass and cedar and dark stone, a low roofline that followed the hill’s contour, a ribbon driveway that curved between oak trees I had not planted but had chosen to inherit. I had toured it three times in the middle of the day, when the floor-to-ceiling glass walls turned the living room into a lantern. At night, it was an aquarium.
And right now, through those illuminated panes, I could see my mother moving across my living room with a yellow tape measure extended between her hands. She was not visiting. She was measuring for curtains.
My sister-in-law, Briana, stood a few feet behind her with her arms folded and her head tilted at the angle she uses when appraising something she doesn’t own but is already deciding what to do with. She was wearing a coat with a fur collar that had never encountered real weather. Her hair was salon-perfect and entirely wrong for an empty house she had no business being inside.
And beside the kitchen island, partially obscured by the marble edge, stood a third woman. I recognized her in the way you recognize something unpleasant — slowly, and then all at once. Celeste Morgan.
A friend of Briana’s from the country club. The woman who had once leaned over a buffet table at my mother’s charity luncheon and asked me, in a voice slathered with assumption, whether I was “still doing landscaping for rich people.”
She was holding her phone up. Filming.
My lights were on. My recessed lighting, which I had selected from a showroom catalog with the particular pleasure of someone who has never chosen anything solely for herself before — was illuminating all three of them in clean, warm detail, their reflections doubling in the glass, giving the impression of six intruders moving through my space. My hands did not shake.
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