POV: Rachel Carter
I was washing the same cup for the third time when my phone rang. I had been doing things like that all morning. Starting tasks and losing the thread of them, finding myself at the kitchen window looking at the backyard without remembering walking there, picking up objects and setting them down in different places without purpose. My body moved through the house on automatic while my mind was somewhere else entirely.
The locked chest sat open on the kitchen table. Empty now. Every secret removed and examined and either given away or made irrelevant by the events of the past two weeks. I had not moved it because doing so would require deciding where to put it and I had not been able to make that decision. My phone rang, Maya’s name on the screen.
I dried my hands an
