Chapter 13
Kari
The paint goes on smooth. That's the thing about fresh coats—they don't care what's underneath. Plaster, scars, your name carved in jagged letters by someone who was standing in your parlor while you slept one floor above. The paint just covers it all with the same patient blue-gray.
"There you go," I tell the wall. "Good as new."
The wall doesn't answer. Millicent, the surviving wallpaper on the opposite side, offers no commentary either. Even the house seems to be holding its breath, and I hate that. The Foxglove used to breathe—creaking floorboards like sighs, pipes groaning their good mornings. Now every sound is a question I don't want to ask.
I load the roller again. Smooth, even strokes. I refinished three rooms before Liam showed up and turned my renovation project into a crime scene. I can paint a wall.
The trick is not looking at the spot where the letters were. The primer covered them. The first coat sealed them. This second coat will erase them entirely. Then I'll stand here and admire my work and absolutely not think about the fact that someone stood in this exact spot with something sharp while I was upstairs in bed.
I tap my thumbnail against my teeth. Stop it. Roll.
The morning light comes through the parlor windows all golden and generous, the way it always does. I used to love this light. I used to stand in this room and think this is mine with a fierceness that surprised me, because I've never been possessive about anything. Not the apartment I shared with my ex. Not the career I built and then watched dissolve like sugar in hot water when the agency restructured.
But the Foxglove—Margit's Foxglove—I claimed this house the way you claim a stray cat. Not because I deserved it but because it needed someone.
The roller runs dry. I reload it, and a drop of paint lands on my shoe. My shoe that I put on this morning in the bedroom that Liam and I share. The bedroom with the yellow bedspread and the window he finally locked and the pillow wall that stopped existing days ago.
"You're getting a third coat," I inform the wall. "Don't argue."
I finish the second coat and step back. Clean, blue-gray, unblemished. No one would know. And that's worse, somehow—that the evidence can be erased so easily. That someone can violate your home and all it takes is a trip to the hardware store and forty-five minutes with a roller.
The banana bread is already in the oven. I started it before the painting, because I am a woman who has her priorities in the correct order, and those priorities are: cover the damage, feed someone, fall apart later. Preferably never.
Liam is in the kitchen when I come in to wash the roller. He's on the phone—low voice, clipped sentences, the operative cadence I've learned to recognize. His back is to me, but his shoulders carry a tension that wasn't there a week ago. Now they're a barometer I check more often than the weather.
He hangs up and turns. Those gray eyes sweep over me—paint on my hands, on my shoe, a streak on my forearm I didn't notice.
"Wall's done," I say, brighter than I feel. The sunshine is a performance now. I know it. He probably knows it too.
"Kari—"
"It needed a second coat anyway. The first one was uneven. I was going to redo it before—" I gesture vaguely. Before someone carved my name into it like a promise. "Before."
His jaw does the thing. The micro-clench that means he wants to say something he's decided I don't need to hear.
"The bread's almost done," I say. "Banana walnut. I'm bringing a loaf to Oren."
"I'll walk you over."
"I know."
We look at each other across the kitchen—the kitchen where a chair was repositioned to face the front door, where a letter offered me money for my home, where the morning light falls on the counter like nothing has changed. Everything has changed. I just refuse to let it show.
My phone rings while I'm pulling the bread from the oven. Del's name on the screen. I wedge it between my ear and shoulder, both hands occupied with the loaf pan and a dish towel.
"Tell me you're packing."
"Good morning to you too, Delaney."
"Don't Delaney me. I called Nina. She told me about the wall."
I set the bread on the cooling rack. The kitchen smells like warm banana and brown sugar, and for one second—one brief,stupid second—it smells like safety. "The wall is fixed. I painted it this morning. Three coats."
"Kari." Del's voice drops into the register she reserves for serious conversations and bad Yelp reviews. "Someone broke into your house."
