“I can’t.” I didn’t raise my head, not wanting to look at Elizabeth. I spoke slowly, careful not to let too much emotion spill out, placing one word in front of the next like walking a tightrope. “My best friend at my last job framed me. They think I stole some paintings and embezzled money. There wasn’t enough proof to bring charges, but I don’t think I can work in a museum, or gallery, or maybe anything like that again.”

After a few minutes of studying my hands and waiting, I raised my head. Elizabeth was looking steadily at the road without expression. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Did she believe I was innocent? Did she think I was guilty of lying, stealing, or oversharing? There was no way to know without asking, and I realized it didn’t matter.

I was tired of hiding my past, and I wouldn’t apologize for it.

Not anymore.

CHAPTER

8

WEEKS PASSED. WHILE the news screamed stories about the murdered man and woman found in pieces under the live oak trees of Brazos Bend State Park, Michael and I fortified our home. “It’s safer to park in the garage and shut the door before you go into the house,” he told me after the news reported another driveway robbery—on top of the home invasions and the convenience store shootings and the drug busts and speculations about the missing drivers of at least two other abandoned vehicles. Somehow I’d thought we had left big-city crime behind when we moved to the suburbs, but as the fourth-biggest city in the United States, Houston’s presence dominated our almost-idyllic neighborhood.

One weekend Michael and I pulled down the wallpaper in the kitchen, spraying and scraping it off the drywall where it had been glued. In the paint store, I saw kits for a faux finish called Venetian plaster. While I deliberated with the can in my hands, Michael came up behind me, and I held it so he could see the directions. Squinting, he said, “Sounds like a lot of work, but if you’re up for it, maybe do the small bathroom first. It could use a refresh.”

He wasn’t wrong. The burgundy-and-pine-striped wallpaper looked like something the old man had chosen alone, while the cream paper with pale-pink flowers we’d stripped from the kitchen might have been the choice of a long-ago wife. Now we’d designated one of the bedrooms for guests, and the other, currently empty, would probably be a nursery.

Someday.

We bought creamy paint with a buttery undertone for the kitchen, spray-on texture to cover the flat surface of the drywall, drop cloths and sandpaper, rollers and more wallpaper remover, and the Venetian plaster too, even though it involved about sixteen different steps.

I had the time.