Part 4
The house held all of it without changing.
“Did she fall from here?” he asked.
No one replied.
He turned back.
Patricia had moved closer to the coffin. She rested her fingers against Clare’s sleeve, careful not to touch skin. Evan stood several feet away now, his posture closed.
Owen noticed something else: Evan had not looked directly at Clare since the bruise was exposed.
“You were with her,” Owen said.
Evan’s eyes lifted.
“You said she called you. You said you found her. Those are not the same thing.”
“I was with her.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“It was late.”
“Was she alone?”
Evan hesitated.
The pause was not long. It did not need to be.
Owen walked toward him.
“Was she alone?”
“No.”
The word came softly.
Patricia’s fingers tightened around the edge of the coffin.
Owen stopped within a few feet of Evan. “Who else was here?”
Evan looked at him.
Owen waited.
“There was no one else,” Evan said.
The room became very quiet.
Owen had never been a man who enjoyed confrontation. People mistook his composure for confidence, but most of the time it was simply practice. He had learned early that a calm voice made other people tell him more than they intended. He had learned that anger made rooms close up.
But there were moments when calm became another form of cowardice.
He heard Clare’s voice in his memory, not as a scene, not as something alive enough to return to, but as the echo of a sentence she had said while standing beside him at the bedroom window.
You never ask the second question.
At the time, he had thought she meant business. A contract. A client. Some argument about his habit of accepting the version of events that cost him the least discomfort.
He looked at Evan now and asked the second question.
“Then why did you say she was alone?”
Evan’s mouth opened, then closed.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You let me think it.”
“I was trying to—”
“To what?”
“Protect her.”
Owen blinked.
The word was so familiar it felt obscene.
Protect her.
The same word he had used. The same word he had believed in. The same word that had somehow left Clare dead in white satin.
Patricia lifted her head. “You protected no one.”
Evan’s face hardened. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know she was afraid to be in this house with you.”
“That is not true.”
“She told me.”
“She was confused.”
The answer came too quickly.
Patricia’s eyes widened. Owen felt the floor shift beneath him.
“What did you say?” she asked.
Evan exhaled through his nose. “She was overwhelmed.”
“You said confused.”
“I meant emotionally.”
“You always mean emotionally when a woman says something you don’t want to hear.”
“Patricia.”
“Don’t use my name like you get to calm me down.”
Her voice broke at the end. She turned away from him, and Owen saw the terrible effort it took for her not to fall apart. She had been composed through the funeral home paperwork, through the flowers, through the choice of dress. She had moved through the day with a hard, brittle grace, correcting small details because small details were the only things that still obeyed her.
Now the control was leaving her in pieces.
“She said he came here after you left,” Patricia said.
Owen looked at Evan.
“I had been in Boston,” he said.
“Chicago,” Patricia said.
He stared at her.
“She corrected me when I said Boston. She said, ‘No, Chicago. He is always somewhere with glass buildings and meetings.’ Then she laughed.” Patricia’s voice thinned. “She laughed like it was funny. It wasn’t funny.”
Owen wanted to say he had come home early once. He wanted to list the times he had canceled dinners, sent flowers, rubbed Clare’s feet when her ankles swelled. He wanted to offer evidence of love.
None of it fit in the room.
“She called you?” he asked Patricia.
“Yes.”
“And she said Evan came here?”
“She said he had been asking questions about the baby.”
Evan’s eyes flicked to Clare’s stomach.
Owen followed the glance.
The child had not moved in days, though no one had said it aloud. Owen had been told the baby was gone in the same breath he had been told Clare was gone. Two losses folded into one sentence in a hospital room he could barely remember. He had spent the last twenty-four hours refusing to picture the baby as anything more than a possibility because a possibility could not hurt him as much as a daughter.
But now Evan was looking at the curve beneath the dress.
“What questions?” Owen asked.
Patricia said nothing.
May you like
“Patricia,” Evan warned.
Owen turned sharply toward her. “What questions?”
