“About anything.”
I pressed my back against the wall.
“I know,” Ava said.
“Good.” Another pause.
“Sleep well.”
His footsteps moved toward the kitchen.
The tap ran briefly.
Then silence.
I went back to the bedroom and sat in the dark for a long time.
He was testing her.
He already knew something had shifted.
And tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, he was going to push harder.
We did not have as much time as I had thought.
I called in sick to work the next morning and waited until Daniel’s truck turned off our street.
“Get your coat,” I told Ava.
Marcus lived forty minutes away, in the same house he’d owned for twenty years.
I had been there for barbecues.
I had sat on his back porch and watched him play with his dogs while Daniel grilled and Chloe ran through the sprinkler.
I had never once looked at him and thought: *he knows.*
He answered the door in a flannel shirt, coffee in hand.
When he saw my face, the color left his.
“Ellen.”
“We need to talk,” I said.
“Inside.”
He stepped back.
His eyes moved to Ava behind me and something happened in them — not surprise.
Recognition.
The look of a man who has been waiting for a knock on the door for five years.
We sat at his kitchen table.
