On the first anniversary of Victoria’s death, I bought twelve white roses. I stood in the kitchen turning them in my hands, one stem at a time, thinking how strange it was that a marriage could be reduced to flowers, dates, and the silence left behind. Twelve years.
That was all I got with her. Twelve years of coffee mugs in the sink, whispered jokes in bed, tax-season takeout, school pickups, and the ordinary little moments that only look extraordinary once they are gone. The weight of each rose felt absurd against the weight of all that absence.
I kept counting them anyway, because counting was something I could still do. Then my phone rang. Thomas Garrison, the contractor I had hired to renovate Victoria’s old office, sounded so shaken I barely recognized his voice.
He was a solid man, not one to call about small things. Whatever he had found had rattled him down to the register of his words. He told me to come down right away.
He said the boys should come too. Then he said something I still hear clearly even now, even in the middle of the night when the house is quiet and grief settles back into the walls like old cold air: “Bring a lawyer if you’ve got one.” By the time I hung up, my pulse was so loud I could feel it in my throat. I went upstairs and told Leo and Sam to get their shoes.
They were fifteen and thirteen that year, old enough to recognize the specific silence that follows a phone call that changes things. Neither of them asked questions. We drove across Portland in a quiet that felt older than one year.
Victoria’s office had sat untouched since the night she died. She and Marcus Vance had run Sterling and Vance Accounting together for nearly a decade. Small clients.
Honest work, or so I had always believed. Churches, youth leagues, neighborhood nonprofits, family businesses that handed over their records the way people hand over their children to a doctor: with complete and uncomplicated trust. Victoria believed numbers were moral.
She believed that if you cared for people’s records carefully enough, you were caring for the people themselves. It was one of the things I loved most about her, that particular seriousness she carried, the way she looked at a ledger the way other people look at a promise. Marcus had always seemed cut from the same cloth.
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