Now he stood red-faced, staring at me as though I were the problem.
I didn’t shout.
I didn’t cry.
I smiled.
“Fine.”
Then I got up and went upstairs.
They assumed I had given in.
They had no idea what that word was about to mean.
After my husband, Michael, died four years earlier, the silence had been the cruelest part of widowhood.
His slippers stayed beside the bed for months.
Sometimes I still listened for his key turning in the front door.
So when Greg asked whether he and Sarah could stay with me temporarily, part of me was relieved.
“Just until we save enough for our own place,” he promised.
I believed him.
At first, the company helped fill the emptiness.
Then, gradually, I began disappearing from my own home.
Sarah rearranged my kitchen.
She discarded vintage dishes Michael and I had bought for our twenty-fifth anniversary because they didn’t fit her “minimalist aesthetic.”
