Chapter 5: Be Normal
Being normal is its own kind of performance.
I came home to find Daniel in the kitchen, heating something on the stove, the baby on a play mat on the floor between the island and the window.
He looked up when I walked in and gave me the same half-smile he had been giving me for months — the one that didn't quite reach his eyes.
"Good day?" he asked.
"Quiet," I said.
I set my bag down, picked up the baby, pressed my face into his neck.
He smelled like warm laundry and something sweet.
I held him a little longer than usual.
Daniel didn't notice.
He was stirring whatever was in the pot.
We ate dinner.
We talked about nothing — a neighbor's new car, a show he had started watching, whether the baby was ready to try solid food.
I answered every question.
I asked a few of my own.
I cleared the plates.
His mother called at eight.
He took it in the other room.
I sat on the floor next to the baby's mat and listened to the tone of Daniel's voice through the wall — not the words, just the rhythm.
It was low and steady.
The voice of someone reporting, not chatting.
When he came back, he said, "She just wanted to check in."
"That's nice," I said.
He sat on the sofa.
I stayed on the floor with the baby.
At nine-thirty I said I was tired and went to bed.
I lay in the dark and thought about Grace's legal pad.
Six pages.
Every name, every date, every small thing I had noticed and dismissed over the past year — the way his mother had started coming over without calling ahead, the way Daniel had begun answering her calls in other rooms, the afternoon three months ago when I had walked into the study and he had closed his laptop faster than the situation required.
I had told myself I was being paranoid.
Tired.
New-mother anxious.
I had not been paranoid.
My phone lit up on the nightstand.
A message from Dana.
*Grace called me.
She said you were impressive today.
She also said: don't look at the folder again.
Don't touch anything in that house that isn't yours.
Just wait.*
I typed back: *Waiting is hard.*
Dana replied immediately: *I know.
But you're already winning and they don't know it yet.
That's the best position you can be in.*
I put the phone face-down and stared at the ceiling.
Daniel came to bed at eleven.
He said goodnight.
I said goodnight.
He fell asleep quickly, the way people do when they haven't spent the day carrying something heavy.
I lay awake until past midnight.
At 12:47 my phone lit up again.
I turned it over expecting Dana.
It was a number I didn't recognize.
The message said: *I need to speak with you.
Not by phone.
I know what they did.
— P.H.*
P.H.
Patricia Howe.
May you like
I sat up in the dark, heart going fast and quiet at the same time, and read the message four more times.
She had reached out first.
