Chapter 3: Discovery

Claire’s car was in its usual spot outside the apartment, nosed in at the same slight angle it always ended up at no matter how many times he told her the lines were straight if she just looked at them. That registered as normal. He almost didn’t clock it at all, the way you don’t clock a stop sign you’ve seen ten thousand times.

Grant’s car was different. It was parked two spaces down, nose out, like he’d pulled in fast and wanted to be able to leave the same way. Evan sat behind the wheel a second longer than he needed to, keys still in his hand, air conditioning ticking as it cooled down, and looked at that car like it was a word in a language he almost spoke. His stomach was still turning slow, greasy circles from the fish, and some part of him — small, quiet, easy to talk over — was already flagging the wrongness of it before the rest of him caught up enough to name what felt wrong.

Grant stopped by sometimes. That was true. He’d swing through with something for the registry, a card, a bottle of wine he’d picked up because he happened to be driving past the good liquor store. It wasn’t unheard of. Evan told himself that walking up the sidewalk, told himself that again on the stairs, one hand on the railing because the ground still felt slightly unreliable under him, the fish and the fever making everything a half-step off from where he expected it to be. He was still telling himself some version of it when he got his key into the lock, and he kept telling himself right up until the door swung open and the apartment was quiet in a way that wasn’t actually quiet — the particular hush of two people trying not to make noise.

He stood in the entryway a second, jacket half off one shoulder, listening. Low voices. Close together. Coming from down the hall, behind the bedroom door.

She’s on the phone, he thought, which made no sense, because who whispers on the phone in their own apartment. Maybe the TV, he thought next, though the TV was in the living room, not the bedroom, and he knew that, and some part of his brain flagged that too and got ignored anyway. He set his keys down on the counter without looking at what he was doing. He walked past the kitchen table with Claire’s binder still open on it, past the photos in the hallway — homecoming, graduation, the lake house two summers back, all of them looking down at him with no idea what was about to happen to the future they were supposed to be leading toward — and his hand was on the bedroom doorknob before he’d consciously decided to put it there.