Then my friend Naomi, who works in local media and opens with, “Please tell me you’re sitting down and not reading headlines alone.”
Apparently word has already spread.
Not the full story, not yet, but enough. Someone saw Ethan and Lauren enter the law office. Someone recognized Lauren from previous whispered sightings. Someone connected the baby. The internet, always hungry for elegant ruin, has begun nibbling at the edges of my life.
Naomi offers to come over.
I tell her not yet.
Because right now my grief feels like a house fire and my anger feels like clean metal cooling in open air, and I need one night with neither witness nor advice. Just files. Quiet. Margaret’s journal. The first unedited version of my own thoughts.
I stay at the house.
Dolores brings tea without asking, then soup later, and once before bed she squeezes my shoulder and says, “She loved you, you know. In her own weird scary way.”
I believe it.
The next morning begins the war.