“I didn’t lie. Not exactly,” Helen said, scrambling. “I just left some parts out because I thought you’d get mad.”

“I can’t imagine why,” he said, voice thick and harsh with sarcasm. “You said you were going for a girls’ night out on the town. I was imagining karaoke and cosmos, not summoning the dead. You went because of Hattie, right? You’re so obsessed with this woman, this woman you’ve never met, who died almost a hundred years ago, that you go and sit down with a bunch of nutjob strangers to try to conjure her up?”

“I thought they might—”

He held up his finger in a but wait, there’s more gesture.

“Tell me about the mantel, Helen,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking. First the beam, then the bricks. I thought it was great at first, that you were incorporating pieces of history into our house, repurposing materials.”

Really? Then why’d you argue with me about it every step of the way? she thought, but stayed silent.

“But it’s weird, Helen. Your insistence on bringing home objects connected to these women who died in terrible ways. So, who did the mantel belong to, Helen? What’s the real story behind it? I wondered when you brought it home but didn’t ask. But now I’ve got to know.”

“I—”

“Tell me the truth, Helen. Please. Or are you just going to lie to me again? It must be getting pretty easy by now.” He looked so crushed.

She felt a horrible weight bearing down on her. Guilt. How had it come to this? How had she become a woman who could do something like this, sneak around and lie to her own husband, the man who was once the great love of her life, the man she once shared every secret thought with?

Because he doesn’t understand, a little voice whispered. He never has.

“Okay. The mantel belonged to a woman named Ann Gray. She was Jane’s daughter. Hattie’s granddaughter.”

Nate clenched his jaw. “Yeah, I figured. But let me guess. There’s more to it than that, right? She died in some really horrific way?”

Helen thought of lying. She did. But Nate would look online and learn the truth in a few quick keystrokes. She sighed and nodded.

“It was a murder-suicide. Her husband shot her, then himself.”

He laughed in a sickening I can’t believe this is happening kind of way. “So the mantel—this mantel that you just had to have, that we had to do a major redesign for—for our new home, our new life together that we left everything behind for, it came from the house where the guy shot his wife and then himself?”