He returned to the house slower, more deliberate. Penelope met him at the door, worry flickering through her eyes before she smoothed it away.
“You’ve been gone a while.”
“Long enough,” he said, forcing a smile that didn’t hold.
She didn’t press, but when she turned back toward the kitchen, he noticed the way her hand trembled on the doorframe. She had seen something too, perhaps—not the tire marks, but the weight of watching eyes.
By noon, the tension had settled so thick the air itself seemed brittle. James tried to distract himself in the library, but the words on the page slipped away unread. He felt her presence down the hall, soft movements, the sound of a kettle, the faint thread of her humming. It grounded him in ways he hadn’t known he needed, and terrified him because it mean
