Chapter 4: What the Neighbor Told Me
I sat in my car outside their house for four minutes before I started the engine.
I know it was four minutes because I watched the clock on the dashboard without meaning to.
6:41.
6:42.
6:43.
6:45.
There's something else you should know.
He had started to say it.
Then Megan had looked at him, and he had swallowed it whole.
I drove home.
I made tea I didn't drink.
I sat at my own kitchen table and looked at the wall.
My phone rang at 9:18.
I expected Daniel.
It was my neighbor, Carol, who had lived three doors down for eleven years and who had, on more than one occasion, been the first person to tell me something I needed to hear.
"I saw your car leave Daniel's early," she said.
"Everything okay?"
"Not entirely."
A pause.
"Do you want company?"
She was at my door in ten minutes with a bottle of wine she didn't open because she could see from my face that this was not a wine conversation.
She put it on the counter and sat down.
I told her everything.
The list.
The rules.
The fee.
Rule 5.
Daniel's silence.
The thing he almost said.
Carol listened without interrupting, which was not her natural state.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"Can I tell you something?" she said.
"Please."
"About three weeks ago, I ran into Megan at the pharmacy.
We chatted for a few minutes.
She seemed fine, normal.
But when I mentioned you — I said something like 'Linda must be so excited' — her whole face changed."
"Changed how?"
"Closed down.
She smiled, but it was the kind of smile that means the conversation is over." Carol turned her wine glass in her hands.
"I didn't think much of it at the time.
But then she said something odd."
I waited.
"She said, 'Daniel's mother has a way of making everything about herself.
She always has.'"
The words sat on the table between us.
"She said that to you?
About me?"
"Word for word." Carol met my eyes.
"I didn't say anything because I didn't know what was going on.
But Linda — that's not a woman who's just setting boundaries.
That's a woman who has already decided who you are."
I thought about the nursery.
The onesies.
The afternoon we spent on the floor together laughing.
"I thought we were close," I said.
"Maybe she let you think that."
I didn't want to believe it.
But I kept coming back to Daniel's face when Megan looked at him.
The way he sat back down without a word.
"Carol, what if this isn't really about Easter?
What if there's something else driving this?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know.
Daniel started to tell me something tonight and then stopped.
He looked scared."
Carol set her glass down.
"Scared of Megan?"
"Scared of something."
We sat with that for a moment.
My phone lit up on the table.
A text from Daniel.
*Sorry about tonight.
Can we talk tomorrow?
Just us.*
I showed Carol.
She read it.
She looked up.
"He wants to tell you," she said.
"Whatever it is, he wants to tell you."
I typed back: *My house.
Ten o'clock.*
Three dots appeared.
Then: *Okay.*
I set the phone face-down.
"Whatever he tells me tomorrow," I said, "I have a feeling the list is the smallest part of this."
Carol nodded slowly.
Outside, a car passed.
The kitchen light hummed.
Somewhere in that house three streets over, my grandchild was still two weeks from being born, and I was sitting in my kitchen wondering how I had gone from folding tiny onesies on a nursery floor to this.
My phone lit up again.
Not Daniel this time.
Megan.
One line: *Please don't come tomorrow.
Daniel and I need space.*
I read it twice.
Daniel had texted me at 9:34.
Megan had texted me at 9:41.
Seven minutes apart.
May you like
He had told her he was coming.
And she had moved to stop it before morning.
