“Where is she?”
“Upstairs. Settling in. Be nice, okay? She’s really fragile.”
Donna Carter had never been fragile a day in her life. She was sixty-two, perfectly lacquered, wore jewelry like armor, and treated every dining table as if it were a throne room. In the two years I had known her, she had criticized my cooking, my furniture, my hours, my refusal to take Ryan’s last name before the wedding, and once, memorably, the way I folded napkins. Fragile was not the word I would have chosen.
Predatory was closer.
I went inside without answering him and headed straight up the stairs. The heels of my pumps hit the hardwood in hard little clicks that echoed through the foyer. Before I reached the second floor, I heard hangers scraping and something heavy hitting the floor. I stepped into the doorway of the master suite and stopped.
Donna stood in my walk-in closet with both doors wide open. My leather briefcases, my trial totes, the handbags I had bought to mark victories I had earned one punishing year at a time, were piled in the hallway like laundry. One entire shelf was already lined with her shoe boxes. My cedar drawers were pulled open. She held one of my garment bags in two fingers as if it offended her.
“There you are,” she said, turning as though I were late to an appointment she had scheduled. “You have entirely too much closet space for one person.”
For one beat I simply looked at her. Behind me, Ryan hovered in the doorway pretending to study the crown molding.
“You are removing my things from my closet,” I said.
Donna tilted her head. “Our family is growing, Claire. Sharing is part of maturity. Besides, the guest room mattress downstairs is terrible for my back, and your bed is the only acceptable one in the house.”
“It’s my bed.”
“It’s Ryan’s bed too, and in forty-eight hours it becomes a marital bed. Honestly, you should start adjusting your mindset now. Marriage requires flexibility.”
The sight of my things stacked in the hall pushed me past anger and into something much more useful. Rage is noisy. It fogs the surface. But when you work in forensic accounting, the first thing you learn is that liars like emotional weather. They want you offended, crying, flailing, reacting—anything but observing. Donna wanted outrage. Ryan wanted guilt. Both wanted me distracted.
So I observed.