I wasn’t supposed to be home that day. The migraine had come on fast, the kind that sits behind one eye and makes light feel like a personal attack. I had called the florist and rescheduled, driven home with my sunglasses on against a gray sky that was somehow still too bright, and turned onto our street thinking about nothing except getting into a dark room and lying still.
Sophie’s car was in the driveway. I noticed it the way you notice something that doesn’t fit — not alarm exactly, more like a small snag in the fabric of the ordinary. She should have been at work.
Jamie should have been at work. I should have been choosing between peonies and garden roses for centerpieces at a wedding that was eight weeks away. The front door was unlocked.
From upstairs, through the particular quiet of an empty house, I heard giggling. I climbed the stairs the way you move in a dream where your legs don’t work properly, where each step takes longer than it should, where some deep animal part of you already knows what your mind is still refusing to process. The door to our bedroom was not quite closed.
Through the gap, Sophie’s voice, warm and easy in a way I’d heard a thousand times at family dinners and lazy Sunday mornings:
“Jamie. We should tell her soon.”
And then his voice, the voice I had fallen asleep to for three years, the voice I had practiced saying yes to in my mirror last month because I wanted to get the cadence right:
“I know, baby. After the wedding, okay?
We’ll figure it out.”
After the wedding. I pushed the door open. They were in my bed.
My sheets — the ones Jamie and I had picked out together, standing in the Bed Bath and Beyond on Clement Street arguing pleasantly about thread count. My sister and my fiancé, in my bedroom, in my house, in the life I had spent three years building. Sophie scrambled for the sheet.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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