Abandoning the phone, I drop forlornly into the chair beside him and glance at our host. “I bet Michael, Anne-Marie, and Kristen all know their friends’ and families’ numbers by heart.”
“Ha” is Mrs. Goodwin’s answer. “Michael loses his phone constantly. He wouldn’t remember his own name if I didn’t write it in his clothes. Kristen and Anne-Marie are little better.” From across the table, she reaches out to pat my hand. “Is your parents’ house far? I’d be happy to drop you off after you eat and warm up.”
Malcolm seizes my knee under the table and I grin.
“That would be wonderful, Mrs. Goodwin. The addressis…”
Mrs. Goodwin leans across the front seat to hug me when we pull up in front of Laura’s house. “Now you promise to call me after you get settled and celebrate your brother’s birthday.”
“I promise.” She smells like the cinnamon she sprinkled in our tea, and I let myself breathe in the comforting scent. “And we’ll get these clothes back to you too.”
“Keep them. I’ve been meaning to donate them anyway. But come by and have tea with me again sometime.” She glances to the backseat. “You too, Malcolm,” she adds.
I tell her we’re going to let ourselves in through the back door, to make sure she won’t idle out front waiting to see us safely inside. Huddled together under the umbrella Mrs. Goodwin forced into our hands before she let us out of the car, we dart around the side of the house and watch her drive off.
Malcolm’s squeezes an arm around my waist. “Still want to do this?”
No, I want to stare after the kind woman who gave me a sweater and fed me chili. I don’t want to think about the woman whose life I’m about to destroy the second I ring her doorbell. But I nod.
There’s no darting this time as we return to the front of the house and make our way up the brick walkway. The house is a three-story colonial, with white siding, crisp black shutters, and a trio of dormer windows extending from the pitched roof. The lawn is impeccably landscaped, with seasonal purple daisies, pink chrysanthemums, and golden false sunflowers on either side of the columned porch. It’s a beautiful, lovingly kept home, though nowhere near as large or lavish as what I remember from the video of the Abbott estate, the home she likely would have one day lived in if Derek hadn’t died.
Is she bitter about the loss of circumstances as well as the loss of her husband?
The front door is glossy black, and I don’t want to lift my hand to knock on it.
But my sister could be inside.
Or her mother.
Or no one.
“You want me to…?” Malcolm gestures at the door.
My headshake is tight and slight. I have to be strong now.
I knock.
She’s wearing a cardigan sweater when she opens the door, and it’s the same soft shade of pink as I’m wearing. Her hair is long and dark blond, with subtle honey highlights, and somehow it’s not frizzy, despite the rain. Her makeup is equally understated, and there isn’t a hint of a wrinkle in her lightly tanned forehead.
She’s not frozen, though. Her features undergo a remarkable transformation after her cautiously polite greeting. One moment, she’s looking at me with an untroubled expression lifting her delicately arched brows, and the next she’s recoiling as all the blood drains from her face.
Her mouth opens.
“Mom!” A girl calls from upstairs. “I can’t find my phone charger.” Her voice is competing with the rain, so it’s a little muffled, but I hear it and, without even thinking, I take a step forward.
“No!” The woman—Laura—stops me with a guttural whisper as her hand shoots out to clutch the doorframe and bar my entry. Then, in a voice that is all sweetness and ease, one that is at complete odds with the fierce expression on her face, she calls back, “I put it in your nightstand.”
Malcolm, Laura, and I are as still as statues as we wait. Moments later, we hear, “Found it!”
Laura scans my face, a more thorough examination than the initial one. Nothing changes in her features, nothing, but I see the skin around her knuckles turn whiter where her hand is still wrapped around the door.
“You knew,” I say, my voice an accusation and a statement all in one. It’s so obvious now. I didn’t have time to process the implications of her reaction when she first answered the door. But from the moment the girl upstairs spoke, the girl who has to be my sister, I couldn’t think of anything else.
Laura recognizes me, and my skin itches like swarms of insects are skittering their tiny legs all over me.
“How do—”
She puts a hand up, and her nostrils flair in warning at the volume of my voice. I wasn’t shouting, but I wasn’t whispering either. It takes her only a second of stillness to make a decision, and then she snaps into motion.
