I Had Already Signed Before He Landed

I thought about it. I thought about the keypad flashing red in the rain and Ivy's blanket and the specific feeling of standing in your own driveway unable to enter your own house, and I thought about four years of holiday dinners where Diane presided over my table and Karen's photographs on my staircase and the word estate in my husband's mouth as though proximity had made him the architect of something he had simply moved into.

"Yes," I said. "I want to be there."

Molly drove me. We pulled into the driveway at ten-thirty, which was forty minutes before Brent's flight landed, and I changed Ivy's blanket in the back seat and straightened my coat and walked to the front door and entered the original code that Jennifer had recovered from the smart home system administrator that morning by providing documentation of my sole ownership, which had taken Jennifer approximately forty minutes to arrange because Jennifer had been doing this for eight years and she was very good at it.

The door opened.

I walked into my house.

I set Ivy in the bassinet I carried from the car and I sat in the chair in the living room and I waited.

Brent arrived at twelve-twenty. I heard his car in the driveway and then the sound of him at the door, and then the door opened because I had changed the code back to the original while also scheduling a full smart home security reassignment for the following morning that would require my biometric confirmation for any future changes, and he came in carrying his weekend bag with the expression of a man who has spent a four-hour flight preparing for a conversation he believes he can manage.

He stopped when he saw me sitting in the chair.

He looked at the bassinet beside me. He looked at the house, which was exactly as I had left it three days ago, mine and entirely undisturbed. He looked at me.

"Tessa," he said.

"Brent," I said.

Diane came in behind him. She had come from Miami on the same flight, which told me this had been coordinated rather than spontaneous, which told me other things as well. She looked at me with the expression she used when she had decided a situation required her management.

"I think we should all sit down and talk about this reasonably," she said.