Edmund POV
I came home at seven-fourteen.
I know the time because I checked my watch in the driveway, a habit from the years when coming home late required a reason prepared in advance, when Rebecca would be standing in the kitchen or sitting on the stairs waiting with the particular patience of a woman who had learned not to ask where I had been but had not yet learned not to care. I had trained myself to account for the time the way I accounted for everything. Numbers. Evidence. The clean record of a man whose life was organized and explainable.
These days she wasn’t waiting.
I told myself that was easier.
I sat in the car for longer than I needed to, the engine cooling, the evening settling around the house, the lights on the ground floor warm and amber through the curtains in the
