I got out, closed the car door with my hip, and held my keys tightly in my fist so they wouldn’t jingle. The neighborhood was still. December air moved cleanly through the bare trees. Porch lights glowed on automatic timers. A wreath hung on our front door, one I had bought from a school fundraiser because the little girl selling them reminded me of myself at ten, trying too hard to be useful. The wreath had a red bow that Caleb said was “a little much,” though he had never once bought a wreath himself.
I crossed the lawn instead of the driveway, my shoes dampening in the cold grass.
At the porch, I paused under the camera.
The little blue light blinked steadily.
Indifferent.
That camera had been Caleb’s idea. “For safety,” he said after a package went missing from the porch two years earlier. He installed it himself, made a show of linking it to both our phones, and then slowly, quietly, became the only one who checked it. I stopped getting notifications after an app update. He said he would fix it. He never did. I did not realize until later that technology in a marriage can become like furniture: familiar enough that you stop asking who controls it.
I unlocked the door with my key because the keypad made a beep, and I did not want a beep.
The lock turned. I eased the door open and stepped into the dark entryway.
The first thing I noticed was the television.
The living room TV was on low, not loud enough to be entertainment, just loud enough to wash the hallway in a watery blue light. Caleb liked falling asleep to documentaries, especially ones about disasters. Airplane investigations. Shipwrecks. Mountain rescues. He said the narrators relaxed him, all those calm voices explaining how other people’s lives had gone wrong. I used to tease him for it. “Nothing says bedtime like mechanical failure,” I would say, and he would laugh and pull me close.
The second thing I noticed was the perfume.
It was not mine.