Crystal waits for more, but Pam doesn’t elaborate. The silence roars through her ears. Her phone slices through the tension. “Sorry, I’ve been expecting this call.” She steps onto the front porch and answers. “Bec? Are you okay?”

There’s only rustling on the other end. She looks at the phone as if that will give her an answer and tries again. “Bec? Can you hear me?” Bec’s voice muffles in the background, and Crystal realizes she must have accidentally called her. She listens for a few minutes, then hangs up. At least she’s okay.

Inside, Pam has already disappeared. She walks up the spiral staircase. In Savi’s room, Savi excitedly takes Pam through her latest magic trick. Pam oohs and ahhs in all the right places. To her relief, Savi doesn’t seem agitated, annoyed, or frustrated. Maybe it’s the boxes being removed. Maybe it’s the fact that she was finally honest with Crystal about wanting to feel better. Talking helps. Maybe it’s … She walks down the hall as snapshots corkscrew her conscience. Paul. The crash. What came after.

She shuts the heavy door and collapses on the floor. The images come. The more she pushes them away, the more they close in. She blinks. There’s Paul, at the end of the aisle, waiting for her. She remembers the giddy swell in her chest of being a carefree, young bride. Then the day Savi was born and Paul’s tears of happiness. Their first house outside of Chicago with the wraparound porch and duck pond … a house she thought they’d grow old in. But as Savi grew up, they grew apart. She was the idiot wife who truly had missed all the signs: how he’d carry his phone with him wherever he went. The made-up work events. The stories that every clichéd husband told, and yet she really hadn’t known. She’d been too consumed with Savi, preschool, violin lessons, then cello, and reconstructing her interior design career from a years-long gap.

She rolls to her back and blinks at the ceiling. The first day of Savi’s kindergarten, Paul had called from a work trip. She’d been prepared to ask him if he’d lost his job or had some secret gambling addiction she hadn’t known about. Instead, he shocked her with his confession. He said that name—Evelyn—and everything unraveled quickly after that. What he’d been hiding. What she didn’t want to hear.

“No.” Her answer was clear. “We have a daughter. We have a life. No. You can’t do this.”

“It’s not a request, Crys.”