Part 2
Like fingers.
His breathing changed. He heard it in the quiet foyer, loud and uneven.
“What is this?” he whispered.
Patricia’s jaw trembled.
Evan’s shoes shifted against the marble.
Owen turned toward him. “Did you know about this?”
Evan glanced toward the coffin and away again. “Owen, this is not—”
“Did you know?”
“I saw her after she fell.”
The words landed without shape at first. Owen heard them, but they did not arrange themselves into meaning. He stood fully now, one knee stiff from the marble floor, his navy suit pulling tight at the shoulders.
“You saw her after she fell,” he repeated.
Evan’s face had gone careful. He had always been good at looking careful. At business meetings, it made people trust him. He could sit through an hour of bad news without raising his voice or touching his face. He had the kind of stillness Owen had once mistaken for discipline.
“I came here because she called me,” Evan said. “She was upset.”
Patricia made another sound, this one closer to anger.
Owen looked at her. “You knew?”
Her eyes flashed toward Evan before settling on Owen. “I knew she was frightened.”
“Frightened of what?”
Patricia’s lips parted, but nothing came out.
Owen felt something in himself begin to separate. It was not rage yet. Rage would have been easier. Rage had direction. This was a cold thing, spreading behind his ribs, making every memory unstable.
Clare had been frightened.
He had not known.
Evan stepped forward slightly. “You need to sit down.”
Owen looked at him.
The advice was so ordinary that for a second it almost worked. It had the same tone Evan used when he spoke to contractors, accountants, people who were becoming emotional in rooms where Evan believed emotion was inconvenient.
Owen’s blue-gray eyes narrowed. “Do not tell me what I need.”
“I’m trying to keep this from getting worse.”
“Worse than my wife lying in a coffin?”
Patricia flinched.
Evan did not. “I meant worse for you.”
The sentence stayed in the air.
Owen looked back at Clare. The room seemed too bright around her, too full of polished surfaces and straight lines. She looked younger than twenty-eight in death. The long dark brown hair had been arranged neatly around her shoulders, smooth against white satin. Someone had tucked a loose strand behind one ear. Owen wanted to know who had done it. He wanted to know whether Clare would have hated being arranged that way.
He remembered, suddenly and stupidly, that she never liked people touching her hair unless she was sick.
He had not been there when she was sick.
He had been in Chicago, standing in a hotel hallway with a paper cup of coffee in his hand, trying to sound patient while she said, “Can you come home?”
He had said, “I can move things around.”
She had gone quiet for half a beat.
Then she had said, “Never mind.”
The thought struck so hard that he had to grip the coffin edge.
Patricia took one step toward him, then stopped. “She didn’t tell you because she knew what you would do.”
Owen turned. “What would I do?”
“You would have tried to fix it.”
“I would have helped her.”
“You would have called people. You would have written checks. You would have decided what mattered before she could finish a sentence.”
The accusation was quiet. That made it worse.
Owen laughed once, without humor. “This is what you’re doing now?”
Her face tightened. “My daughter is dead.”
“So is my wife.”
“I know who she was before she became your wife.”
The words found their mark. Patricia saw it, and for a moment she looked sorry. Only for a moment.
Owen had known Patricia’s resentment long before he knew its shape. It lived in small things. The way she said his full name when she was displeased. The way she asked Clare whether she was eating enough, sleeping enough, working too much, as though Owen had personally arranged the weather around her. Patricia had never accused him of being cruel. She had never needed to. Her disappointment was more precise than that.
Evan moved closer to her shoulder. “Patricia.”
She turned on him so quickly that the pearls at her throat shifted. “Don’t.”
He put a hand on her shoulder anyway, firm but not rough. It was an intimate gesture, too familiar in a room where Clare lay dead between them.
Patricia looked at his hand. Her breath shook.
Owen saw it.
So did Evan.
For the first time, Evan’s expression changed. It was small. A tightening around the mouth, almost invisible. But Owen had spent years in rooms where people hid fear behind manners. He recognized it.
May you like
“What did she call you about?” Owen asked.
Evan lowered his hand from Patricia’s shoulder. “She was upset about the house.”
