They moved in a few weeks later, having painted the living room a soft dove gray and installed a sofa bed. They were planning to do most of the renovations themselves, but had found a local carpenter-cum-handyman who was going to do the detail work.

Days of scraping and painting and gutting bathrooms ensued. When they weren’t working on the house, they were working on their books, individual islands of words, adrift in the chaos around them. Their breaks consisted of runs to Home Depot and Porter Paints. They lived on takeout until the appliances arrived: the massive Sub-Zero they had to knock down part of a wall to fit in, the double convection oven that just barely slid into the wall space Ethan had designed, the Bosch dishwasher that made no noise when it was running. And then it was time to pick the counters, and Sutton fell in love with that bloody gorgeous marble, and the fighting began.

It was a stupid thing to fight over, a large slab of marble. But fight they did, and the house must have fed off the negative energy, because suddenly everything started going wrong. The paint peeled in the living room, they found asbestos in the attic that the inspectors had missed, a family of mice took up residence in the bedroom, partying and carrying on at all hours of the night. The crack in the damn Doric column gave way, and the porch crashed to the yard below, ruining $500 of plants and shrubs they’d put in the day before.

There were tears and arguments and cold shoulders, and when Ethan began to worry they wouldn’t find their way back, he gave in on the marble. Like a hurricane’s passing, life suddenly calmed. The fights ended. The house came together. They moved the furniture in from the storage unit, and then they were happy. So happy. Sitting together at the kitchen table over their cereal bowls, that big bloody slab of marble glowing gently under the soft white lights, their days were finally unencumbered by the specter of renovation.

Words, all they wanted was words. The two of them, heads bent over laptops, making, creating, in their perfect, customized new home.

How was he to know where things were headed?

It was all his fault. It really was.

He’d gone on a trip. Speaking to a library association. The hotel was small and intimate, the bar cozy. He’d gotten drunk. He only fucked her once, but when he missed his usual good-night check-in, Sutton had known immediately, and when he got home, they’d had the row to end all rows. The house—the goddamn house, that goddamn marble—took her side.

No matter what they did, no matter how they tried, they couldn’t get her blood out.

TELL ME YOUR SECRETS

Now

Ethan sat at the counter in the kitchen, elbows parked in defeat on the wide slab of Carrara marble. The female police officer stood opposite him, notebook out, pen poised above the paper, a quizzical smile on her face.