I take my phone out of my pocket. My thumb finds Liam's name. I don't hesitate. I don't tell myself to handle it. I don't reach for the sunshine or the stubborn independence or the Margit-inherited refusal to be moved.
I press call.
He picks up on the first ring. "Kari."
"I'm upstairs." My voice is steady. My hands are not. I watch them tremble around the phone—both hands, gripping it like it's the only solid thing left in this house. "I'm in the bedroom. There's something on my pillow."
A beat. I hear the shift in his breathing. The sound of a car. He's driving.
"Is Reese there?"
"No. He never showed up."
"Don't touch it."
"I'm not." My voice stays level. Calm. Controlled. "It's a photograph. Margit's headstone. There's a note. Block capitals, same paper as the first ones."
"What does it say?"
I read it to him. My voice doesn't crack. My hands shake so badly the phone nearly slips, and I press it harder against my ear, holding it there with both palms.
"I'm on my way," he says. Something in his voice has gone very quiet. Not calm—the opposite of calm. The dangerous stillness of a man who is choosing his words because the ones he wants to say would scare me more than the photograph. "Twenty minutes. Don't move. Don't go downstairs. Don't?—"
"I know."
"Kari."
"I know."
I sink down against the doorframe. Not into the room—I can't go in there, can't cross the threshold into the space that was mine and is now contaminated with the proof that nowhere in this house belongs to me anymore. I sit on the hallway floor with my back against the frame and the bedroom door open in front of me and the photograph visible on the pillow, a small white rectangle on the cheerful yellow flowers.
She wouldn't leave either.
Margit is dead. Del said it, and I brushed it off, because acknowledging it meant acknowledging what it implied. But the note isn't implying. The note is stating. Margit wouldn't leave, and Margit is dead, and I won't leave, and?—
The sentence ends there. I won't finish it.
The Foxglove creaks around me, old bones settling in the fading light. I press my phone against my chest and wait for the sound of Liam's boots on the porch. My hands won't stop shaking. I wrap my arms around my knees, tuck the phone between my ribs and my thigh, press my trembling fingersagainst my shins until the pressure gives them something to do besides fall apart.
I'm not leaving. I'm still not leaving. But for the first time since I pulled up to Sycamore Lane with Bernadette riding shotgun and a deed to a house I'd never seen—for the first time, I'm afraid the choice might not be mine.
Chapter 14
Liam
Her voice is steady.
That's the part that destroys me — not the words, not the photograph she's describing, not the threat written on a strip of paper and placed on her pillow like a love note from the worst version of the universe. It's the steadiness. The deliberate, architectural calm of a woman holding herself together with nothing but practice and will while her hands shake so hard I can hear the phone shifting against her ear.
"I'm upstairs. I'm in the bedroom. There's something on my pillow."
I'm already moving. Chair pushed back. Jacket in hand. Three steps toward the door before I've formed the word go.
"Is Reese there?"
"No. He never showed up."
The floor drops out. She's been alone this entire time. The Line 13 must’ve pulled Reese too. Vance probably rerouted him before he could reach her. Novak filed the complaint that triggered it. Timed it.
