Chapter 3: Before She Comes Out
She was in her mid-fifties.
Hair pulled back, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead, a dish towel over one shoulder.
She looked like someone who had just stepped away from something on the stove.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
The boy stepped back from the door without being asked.
"Can I help you?" she said.
Her voice was the same one I'd heard from the hallway.
Calm.
Not unfriendly.
The voice of a woman in her own home who has no reason yet to be afraid.
"I'm looking for Richard," I said.
Something moved across her face.
Not shock.
Something older than shock.
"Come in," she said.
"Mum—" the boy started.
"Go upstairs, Joel."
He didn't argue.
He went.
I stepped into the hallway.
The house was cool after the heat outside.
There were shoes by the door — men's shoes, large, worn at the heel.
A jacket on the hook.
An umbrella.
The ordinary furniture of a life being lived.
The green mug was right there on the hall table.
Up close it was exactly as it had appeared in every photograph.
The chip on the handle was on the left side.
I had looked at that mug so many times on my phone screen that I knew which side the chip was on.
She saw me looking at it.
"Sit down," she said.
"Please."
We went into the kitchen.
She filled a glass of water and set it in front of me without asking.
Then she sat across the table and folded her hands and looked at me the way a doctor looks at you when the results are not good.
"How long?" she said.
"I'm sorry?"
"How long were you talking to him?"
I put my hands around the glass.
"Since April."
She closed her eyes.
Just for a moment.
Then she opened them again.
"What name did he give you?"
"Richard," I said.
"Richard Calloway."
She nodded slowly.
The way you nod when someone confirms something you already knew but were hoping was wrong.
"His name is not Richard," she said.
"His name is Paul.
Paul Merritt.
He is my husband."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Outside, somewhere down the street, a lawnmower started up.
"He told me his wife had died," I said.
She didn't flinch.
"I know."
"Four years ago."
"I know what he tells them." She said it without anger.
That was the thing that frightened me most.
She said it the way you say something you have learned to live with.
"You are not the first person to knock on that door."
I set the glass down.
My hand was not steady.
"How many?" I asked.
She looked at the table.
"You're the third one who has come here in person."
I thought about the flight.
The linen jacket.
The forty-one dollar taxi.
My hair, done the day before.
I thought about every morning for six months, waking up and reaching for my phone to see if the photograph of the green mug had arrived yet.
"He never asked you for money?" she said.
"No."
For the first time, something shifted in her expression.
"Then you were lucky."
I didn't feel lucky.
I felt like the walls of the room were at a slight angle.
"Where is he now?" I asked.
She looked toward the ceiling.
Toward the floor above us.
Toward wherever Joel had gone when she sent him upstairs.
"He's at work," she said.
"He comes home at six."
I looked at the clock on the kitchen wall.
May you like
It was twenty past four.
"I think," she said carefully, "that you should still be here when he does."
