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Then the towels. She takes them off the shelf one by one and drops them—not throws them, drops them, watching them land.

She walks to the fridges, opens the second door, slides the tray halfway out, looks in, slides it back. Leaves the door where it is.

She goes to the table. Lifts the sheet at the top, just enough, and looks at Charles's face. She holds it there for a while. Her expression changes as she stares at the man. She closes her eyes, then lets the sheet fall, not quite where it was.

Then she turns around and walks straight to the camera.

She stops under it and looks up. Right into the lens. Right at me.

"Good morning, husband."

Quiet. Steady. Not a hair out of place, like she's known about this camera for weeks and picked her moment. Whatever she came here to make me feel, it's working.

"You've been in my house. You've been in my car. You've been in my hospital, apparently, since you own it now." She picks a pair of scissors off the tray behind her and opens and closes them once, listening to the sound. "I thought I'd see what it feels like from the other side."

She puts the scissors back, open. She looks at the camera one more time, and then she reaches up and the screen goes to static.

I sit there.

My mortuary wasn't broken into. My wife walked in at three in the morning in her bare feet and rearranged my life while I slept above her, and then she got up, ate the toast Dolores made her, told me not to stare, and drove to work.

Fine. Message received. Very clever, ma macabre.

Now where the fuck are you?

The laptop answers me. The static clears and a second feed opens.

Different room. Color this time, daylight. A window, a radiator, a wall I know. I know the shape of that ceiling crack. I have seen this room in six hundred photographs.

Her house.

The timestamp says 1:41 p.m. Four hours ago. I was on the phone with Marchetti around that time, asking him if he had my wife, and my wife was sitting on the floor of the property I own, having used the keys she never gave back. I check the time again. Doesn’t matter. She's not there now. She was there hours ago and she filmed it, then waited until now to let me see.

She's still in her scrubs. She's sitting cross-legged with a cardboard box in front of her, pulling things out of it. A stack of photographs held with an elastic band. Envelopes. A knitted thing, small, a child's. A folder with a university crest on it.

I didn't know that box existed. I had been in that house, had photographs of all the rooms with all their contents. I never saw that box.

She looks up at the camera.

"Oh I had this under the floorboards, you see. You seem to think you know everything about me. That's what you said." She lifts the stack of photographs and taps them against her palm. "Okay. Let's check."

She holds the first one up, facing her, not me.

"What was the first operation I did on my own? Not assisted. Mine."

She waits, like I might answer.

"You don't know."

She puts the photograph down and picks up one of the letters.

"What did my grandmother call me? She had a name for me. Nobody else has ever used it."

Pause.

"You don't know."

The folder.