The house sat in the afternoon light looking exactly the same as it had that morning—Spanish tile roof, climbing roses, blue shutters Dad had paid to repaint when Grant insisted the old color was “too East Coast.” I parked in the circular drive and just sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel.
This had been my home for eleven years. My father bought it when Grant and I got married because, as he put it, “If I’m going to have grandchildren under a roof one day, I’d like that roof not to leak.” We never had the grandchildren, and the roof did not leak, but the marriage had apparently been taking on water for quite some time.
Inside, the house was silent.
No TV. No footsteps. No Grant calling from his office that he’d just be another ten minutes on a deck before dinner. The stillness felt expensive. Earned.
Dad’s study was at the back of the house, tucked behind the library alcove and the bar no one used except at Christmas. I opened the door and was hit by the smell of leather, old paper, and the cedar humidor he’d never quite stopped believing made him look like a statesman. His reading lamp cast a warm circle over the desk. On the wall above it hung the framed black-and-white photograph of him at thirty, one foot braced on the deck of a sailboat, grinning into wind.
The safe sat behind a painting of Carmel cliffs in winter. Dad used to think that was hilarious, the way men of a certain age think moving a painting counts as spy craft.
My birthday clicked in under my fingertips. Month, day, year. The lock released with a small mechanical sigh.
Inside were four thick folders, one flash drive, a ring of keys, and a handwritten note on top that simply said: Start with the red file.
Of course he’d organized it.
I sat in his desk chair and opened the red file first.
Private investigator report.
The tab was labeled with brutal neatness. Inside were dates, hotel receipts, photographs, restaurant reservations, flight records, timelines. Grant exiting a boutique hotel in San Francisco with Becca in sunglasses and jeans. Grant touching the small of her back outside a steakhouse in Chicago. Grant kissing her in the shadow of a valet stand while I was apparently home making lasagna and answering texts about my father’s white blood cell counts.
My stomach rolled, but I kept turning pages.