Page 14 of Wrong Mail

“I’m not trying to push you, I’m telling you what I hear. That’s my job.” Her chair creaks. “Look. You’ve spent two years telling me you’re not that person anymore, and I’ve let you, because you had reason. But I’ve known you a long time, and I know that voice. It’s the one you get when you think there’s a story.”

I stand over the columns with my hand on the counter, and my heart is going faster than it has any cause to. It feels like appetite. That's what frightens me.

“I’d need to make some calls,” I say.

“Make them.”

“I’m not promising you anything. I might get four days into this and find out it’s nothing, and I’ve bothered a lot of grieving people for no reason.”

"Then it's nothing and you'll have made some calls." A beat. "Or it isn't, and I clear October."

Down at the sealed end of the house, the plastic sheeting lifts, then goes still. Luna raises her head from my foot, looks toward it, then settles again.

"Send me what you've got when you've got it," Cassandra says. "And Mallory. Don't disappear on me."

She's gone before I can answer.

I stand in the kitchen with the phone still warm in my hand. The articles cover the island, and I have no business reading any of them.

I try to work out what I've just started.

My hands sorted these into neat rows while the rest of me was somewhere else. Now they reach for the phone. I photograph everything, every article, every page, because I already know I'll have to give it back.

Then I tape the envelope shut and set it by the door.

In the morning I'll carry it up to the Langford house and give it back to the man everyone keeps talking about but nobody has seen.

Chapter Five

There are eleven women on Peggy Erickson's terrace and every one of them has already decided what I am.

I'm four steps through the gate and I can feel it land. The small recalibration, the half-turn of shoulders, the conversation that keeps going while everybody makes room in it for me.

Julia says I imagine this. She’s wrong. Julia has never once had to walk into a room she wasn't sure of.

I know what I am to them. The second wife. The one who doesn't work, doesn't drive, doesn't swim, and turns up to a summer party looking like she's just woken from a nap.

I’m the wrong pick.

Somewhere in a studio in Bellevue, there's a woman in Lululemon who teaches yoga at six in the morning. She laughs easily and has never made a room go quiet by walking into it. One day David is going to wake up and understand he could have had her instead.

I glance down, one last check.

I wore the green dress. Wear something colorful, Peggy said, so I stood in my closet for twenty minutes hating myself for obeying her.

"Mallory! You came." Peggy comes down the terrace steps with both hands out. She takes mine and holds them, and she looks me over like a house she has no intention of buying. She’s forty-eight, blonde to the root, in white linen that hasn't creased once all evening. She has the best view on the point and she has arranged every chair to remind you of it. Behind her, the lake lies calm and copper in the last of the sun. Heat still rises from the flagstones. I feel it through my shoes.

"Wouldn't miss it for the world." I want to gag. "Thank you for having me."

"Don't be silly." She squeezes. "We were beginning to think you'd gone into hiding."

"Just working."

Her eyebrows do something small and interested. "You're working again? How wonderful."

“Not working, working. Just keeping busy. Reading, mostly. It’s nothing that would—” But she's already got me by the elbow and is steering me up onto the terrace like a lost child being walked to the lost-child desk. She isn't listening to a word of it. She never was. Her question was the point. The answer was never going to matter.

Brant Erickson is at the far end with a drink in hand. Three men in half-zip sweaters crowd around him while he tells a story with his arms. How he ever ended up with Peggy is a mystery. He's fifty-two and made his money in biotech. He’s loud and good-humored, with the easy confidence of someone who has never had to wonder if he’s welcome. He lifts his glass to me without breaking his sentence. Whatever else is wrong with this house, Brant has never once made me feel small.