Chapter 15

Judith left on a morning that looked like every other Gainesville morning and felt like someone taking the audience with them.

She stood in the drive with the Civic already facing the wrong direction on purpose. Bigger pot on our porch. Pie tin on the counter like we had been entrusted with a relic. Deadbolt in the door, slightly crooked, functional, Judith-approved.

“Sunday,” she said.

“Sunday,” I said.

Allie had come out of the small room looking like humidity and a weak alibi. Judith flicked her eyes there, then at me, then at the oaks.

“I don’t love it. I also don’t get a vote.” She opened the driver’s door and paused, one foot in the car that had carried the theory this far. “Real deadbolt. Real pillow in that small room or stop pretending the joke is furniture. Call if the rosemary dies. Don’t be foolish with what he left you. Allie—eat. Sarah—you look older when you lie and younger when you don’t. Aim for hydrated.”

She did not say the word.

She started the engine. Gravel. The same ugly corridor, reversed. We watched until the Civic cleared the oaks, because that is what daughters do when the last person from Catalpa drives away with most of the truth still in the passenger footwell.

Allie let out a breath she had been organizing since Marianna.

“Is she gone.”

“She’s on I-10. That’s different from gone. She has our deadbolt in her head.”

“I don’t care what she has in her head.” Allie turned, already moving. “I care what door I’m allowed to sleep behind.”

I locked the new bolt in daylight.

It made a sound like a decision. Allie stopped with her hand on the primary jamb and looked back at me, and the look was not cute. It was four nights of the kid bed and eleven-minute pillow performances and after she leaves stored under the slat with the Georgetown box.

“House first is over,” she said.

“House first is a deadbolt that works.”

“Sarah.”

I took my hand off the lock. “Come here.”

She did not come here. She went to the small room, ripped the hoodie off the hook, and carried her own clothes back down the hall in a pile that said the polite lie had expired at the city limit. Drawers in the primary opened. The clean gap in my closet filled up again like a mouth closing. She dumped the spare charger on the nightstand next to mine. Two plugs. One bed. The room stopped being a listing photo.