Maggie planned to stay two weeks. After four days, she stopped answering my calls. On the fifth day, I got in my truck and drove the three hours myself.
By the time I turned onto Kevin’s street in West Knoxville, I had almost convinced myself I was being foolish. The neighborhood was quiet and expensive in that understated way certain subdivisions try to be, with big oak trees, deep lawns, and houses set back from the road as if privacy were part of the architecture. Kevin’s house was a two-story colonial with white shutters and a broad front porch.
A nice house. Too nice, maybe, for a man who had been telling me for months that his bonus structure had been reworked and money was tighter than expected. But I pushed that thought aside.
I parked at the curb, turned off the engine, and sat for one second with both hands on the wheel. Maggie was fine, I told myself again. She had to be fine.
She was probably exhausted from unpacking boxes, cooking for everyone, organizing closets, and insisting no one else knew how to fold towels properly. My wife could disappear into a project so completely that the rest of the world fell away. After forty-one years of marriage, I knew that about her.
She had forgotten to charge her phone more times than I could count. She had left it on silent in another room. She had misplaced it under laundry baskets, library books, grocery bags, couch cushions.
That was the explanation. It had to be. But four days of silence was not like Maggie.
Not even close. Every morning, she texted me. It had been our thing since Kevin was in middle school and I started working overnight shifts in homicide.
“Good morning,” she would write. Sometimes with a little heart. Sometimes just those two words.
In forty-one years, the only time she missed was when she had gallbladder surgery in 2019, and even then she texted me from the recovery room before the anesthesia fully wore off. Four days of nothing meant something was wrong. I stepped out of the truck.
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