Burning Down Clean
Aria
He walked through the front door at six and I knew immediately.
I’d been sitting on the living room couch for four hours pretending to read, pretending to watch something on my laptop, pretending to be a person who wasn’t counting the minutes since he left. The second I heard his key in the lock I was up, and when he walked in and I saw his face I forgot everything I’d been planning to say.
He looked like a man who had just watched something explode in slow motion and was already calculating the rebuild.
“What happened,” I said.
He set his keys down. Shrugged off his jacket. Didn’t answer immediately, which with Caden meant the answer was complicated enough to require arrangement first.
“Where’s your mother,” he said.
“Eden Prairie. Client meeting. She won’t
