Nothing in that house made sense. Not the sweaters hanging over chair backs in different sizes. Not the crayon drawings taped to the mantel. Not the photographs in mismatched frames of women and girls I had never seen before, smiling with the cautious brightness of people who were learning how to look directly at a camera again. There were children in those photographs. Babies. Teenagers. A little dark-haired boy on somebody’s hip. A freckled girl grinning with two front teeth missing. A young woman holding a toddler on a porch swing, both of them squinting into late afternoon sun.
Not one single picture of me.
Not one.
And because grief had already hollowed me out for three weeks, because the police officer’s words at my apartment door had torn my life open so suddenly that I had not yet learned how to close around the wound, I felt something cold and almost shameful move through me in that instant.
It was not only confusion.
It was jealousy.
My husband had died with secrets, and I was standing inside one of them.