Chapter 1
My name is Jimmy Carver, and the house felt wrong before I had proof.
Not haunted. Not broken. Just quiet in the wrong way, the way a room goes quiet when someone has carried a secret through the front door and set it down beside the furniture like luggage they forgot to unpack.
Mia had wanted the vacation for months. She mentioned it the way she mentioned most things she had already decided, casually, over dinner, turning her fork slowly against the plate while her voice stayed light and her eyes stayed soft. A girls' trip. Jenna. A beach somewhere warm. Spa days, maybe yoga, nothing crazy. I wanted to say no. I could not explain why without sounding like a man who didn't trust his wife, and the thing about suspicion is that it feels uglier than betrayal before betrayal has given you anything to point at.
So I said yes.
At the airport I held her and she kissed me the way she always kissed me when she wanted me to remember something, and her suitcase rolled behind her on the clean floor of departures, and she turned once before the security line and raised her hand in a small wave, and I drove home believing I had just done the mature thing.
For the first three days she played it perfectly. Beach selfies. Videos of Jenna falling off a surfboard. Little hearts at the end of messages. Then the warmth started thinning. Texts got shorter. Calls went to voicemail. At one thirty-seven in the morning I left a goodnight message that sat unread for two hours before she answered: Night. Super tired. Love you. No joke. No heart. No Mia.
May you like
The silence changed shape after that.
She came home on a Thursday. Tanned skin, loose hair, white dress, silver bracelets at her wrist. She hugged me hard at baggage claim and whispered that she had missed me so much, and I held her and felt it, the small hollow inside the embrace, the way a hug can be technically correct in every dimension and still be empty in the place that counts. She smelled like sunscreen and airport air and something else, a perfume I did not recognize.
