Page 18 of Sweet Ruin

I probably shouldn’t be surprised. Connor isn’t stupid or careless. Not like Vivian is. He’d never leave something so incriminating out in the open. He certainly wouldn’t upload it to a shared album.

My phone pings with a new text.

CONNOR: Almost done here. Home soon.

Shit. Clock’s ticking.

I turn and go through the closet on my knees, hauling out a printer we replaced in 2022 and a box of his old college textbooks.

At the back, behind the winter coats, still encased in the dry cleaner’s plastic, is Connor’s black suit.

He wore it in February. I was in a black dress and pillbox hat. We stood together at the front of the church, holding hands, while he hugged Vivian with the other arm. “He was a good man,” he told her. “Nobody should go that young.”

I slept at Mom’s that night to make sure she was okay. Vivian sobbed that she needed to be alone and went home. Connor said he’d drop her off on his way back. I’d thought nothing of it at the time.

Acting on instinct, I pull it out of the plastic wrap.

It smells like the church a little. Or at least, I imagine it does.

My heart is thudding harder and harder as I go through the pockets. The breast pocket is empty, but the inside...

The inside has something.

I pull it out, a thin sheet of paper folded over.

It’s a hotel receipt. A bill for room service and a movie from the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. Two steaks, two sides of fries, two ice creams.

The date is the day we buried my father.

4

DELILAH

My mother opens her front door while I’m still wrestling my father’s projector up her steps.

“Careful with that,” she says. “It was your father’s.”

No hello, no how was the drive. Instead, I get a safety briefing on behalf of a machine that’s older than I am.

“Merry Christmas Eve to you, too, Mom.”

She shows no sign of having heard me. “Set it on a towel, not on the good table. There’s coffee. And don’t disappear on me—I need you on the guest list before you start.”

It is Dad’s projector. It’s roughly the size of a Buick and it hums like it’s preparing for takeoff. I’m the one who boxed it up last spring, when Mom couldn’t stand to open his study and Vivian was “too devastated” to lift boxes.

Do-It-All Delilah took it home in her trunk. Now, it’s late morning on Christmas Eve, and I’m hauling it back, along with my laptop bag, a pulldown screen in a nylon tube, and a tote of extension cords that has been in my trunk for God knows how long.

Is it easy to carry all those things at once? No, it is not. (Especially not on three hours of sleep, for the second night in a row, if anyone’s counting. Obviously, nobody is.)

But does Leanne Dorsey offer me any smidgen of help?

No, she does not.

I wouldn’t be subjecting myself to Mom’s usual barrage of insults and weaponized incompetence—after all, where do you think Vivian learned it from?—if it weren’t for this morning’s very clear mission statement:

Get set up and ensure that everything is ready for tonight.

I can’t afford any surprises. Mom will balk if I push too directly, so I need to be subtle as I suss out the planned order of operations for the evening, confirm who’s coming, and make sure all the pieces are in place.