Seven Thirty
Caden
I heard her car in the driveway at seven twenty-eight.
I was in the kitchen. Aria had disappeared upstairs twenty minutes ago — I’d told her to stay up there, give me the conversation first, let me handle the initial impact before she became part of it. She’d argued. I’d held her face in my hands and asked her to trust me one more time and she’d gone upstairs with her jaw tight and her eyes bright and the specific expression of someone doing something difficult because they believed in the person asking.
That expression had been living in my chest since she walked up those stairs.
I heard the front door. Keys. The particular sound of Diane moving through her own home — heels on marble, bags set down, the small comfortable sounds of a woman returning to a life she’d
