The envelope in my hand bent under my fingers. I looked again at the wheelchair in the living room, at the crumpled blanket, at the untouched medication tray. For ten days I had imagined nothing. I had forced myself to imagine nothing. Not Lauren struggling to reach a glass of water. Not Lauren calling my name in the empty house. Not Lauren staring at the front door, waiting for footsteps that never came.
Now every image attacked me at once.
“Is she?” I whispered.
Daniel’s face changed. Not softened exactly, but something in it shifted, as if my fear had arrived too late to mean anything.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s alive.”
The relief hit so hard I had to put one hand on the back of the sofa.
Alive.
The word should have saved me. Instead, it only opened another door to fear.
“Then where is she?”
Daniel looked toward the kitchen table, where the papers were spread in neat, damning piles. “Read the letter.”
“I’m asking you.”
“And I’m telling you to read what your wife wrote before she left this house.”
Before she left.
