He showed up at eight in the morning, which is a form of violence I don't think gets discussed enough.
I had slept four hours, which for me is actually fine, but I had also spent forty minutes of those four hours standing in the hallway outside the bathroom for a reason I could not fully articulate. Just standing there. In the dark. Listening to the house breathe.
Houses don't breathe.
This one has been doing it anyway since 2019.
I opened the front door before he knocked because Senator had done the single-bark thing twice in the last thirty seconds, which I had recently learned to treat as a doorbell. The man on my porch was tall in a way that looked accidental, like he hadn't planned for it and didn't know what to do with the extra height. Brown jacket. Coffee cup from the gas station on Mercer Street, which meant he had driven in from outside Dunhaven because no local with any self-respect bought coffee from that place. Jaw that had been introduced to a razor sometime in the last three days but only briefly.
He looked at me like I was a math problem he'd already decided he didn't like.
"Meredith Calloway."
Not a question. I appreciated that he didn't bother.
"Detective," I said, because the jacket and the look and the gas station coffee made it obvious.
"Declan Marsh." He held up a badge. I looked at it the appropriate amount of time to be polite and then stepped back to let him in. "I've been assigned to your husband's case."
"Which husband."
He paused in the doorway. "Marcus Calloway."
"Right. Come in. I have real coffee if you want it."
He looked at the gas station cup in his hand, then at me, and I watched him decide something. He stepped inside.
The kitchen looked normal in the morning light, which I found personally offensive after last night. The kettle was just a kettle. The stove light was just a stove light. Senator had stopped barking. Everything had the audacity to seem completely fine.
I poured Declan Marsh a cup of coffee and he sat down at my kitchen table without being invited, which told me something about him. He also put his gas station cup on a coaster without being told, which told me something else.
"You've been widowed three times," he said.
"We covered that yesterday."
"I wasn't here yesterday."
"Your colleagues were."
He opened a folder. Inside it I could see printed photographs, a timeline, and what looked like a very long list of handwritten notes in a script so small it seemed aggressive. "Glen Calloway, 2019. Drowning. Paul Calloway, 2021. Fall. Marcus Calloway, last Tuesday. Currently classified as a missing persons case, though I think we both know that's a formality."
I said nothing. I poured myself coffee. My mug had a chip on the handle that I kept meaning to throw it out over and never did.
"Three husbands, three separate incidents, no witnesses, no forensic evidence connecting you to any of them." He looked up. His eyes were the kind of unremarkable gray that somehow still managed to be annoying. "You want to tell me how that works?"
"I have bad luck."
"That's one theory."
"What's another theory, Detective Marsh?"
"You're very good at not getting caught."
I sat down across from him. The table had a scratch on it from when Marcus tried to assemble flat-pack furniture and lost an argument with an Allen key. I had watched the whole thing. It took forty minutes.
"I have a streaming alibi, two character witnesses, and no motive," I said. "Glen had a life insurance policy worth basically nothing. Paul didn't have one at all. Marcus had a boat that, based on its condition, is probably worth less than the dock slip fees."
"People kill for less."
"People do," I agreed. "I haven't."
He wrote something down. This was beginning to feel like a hobby for detectives assigned to my case.
"The shoes," he said.
I looked at him.
"Marcus's shoes. Left at the end of the dock. Laces tucked in." He tapped his pen on the folder. "That specific detail isn't in the public report. Forensics noted it internally. I'm curious about it."
Outside, Senator barked once.
"I don't know anything about the shoes," I said. Which was true. I didn't know why the shoes were arranged. I didn't know why Glen's bathtub had filled past the point of physics. I didn't know why Paul's fire escape had supposedly held his weight and then didn't. I had questions about all of it, actually. A folder's worth. I just didn't have anyone to give it to.
Declan Marsh was watching my face with the concentration of someone who had been lied to professionally for long enough to notice the difference.
"You're not scared," he said.
"Should I be?"
"Your husband is gone. A detective is in your kitchen implying you might be a murderer." He tilted his head slightly. "Most people show something."
"I cried on Wednesday," I said, which was true and also none of his business. "You missed it. It was a whole event."
He closed the folder. Finished his coffee in two long swallows, which meant he had probably eaten nothing this morning. People who ate breakfast didn't drink coffee like it was medication.
"I'm going to be in Dunhaven for a while," he said. "I'll have more questions."
"I'll have more coffee."
He stood up, picked up the gas station cup, and looked at it for a second like he'd forgotten it existed. Then he looked at the coaster. Then he looked at me.
"Is there anything you want to tell me right now," he said, "before this gets complicated."
Complicated. As though it was not already a strange and specific kind of disaster that had been happening to me for six years. As though I had not spent forty minutes last night standing in a dark hallway listening to a house that should not have a heartbeat.
"No," I said.
He nodded like he'd expected that. He let himself out. The front door closed behind him.
Senator barked once, then went quiet.
I sat at the kitchen table with my chipped mug and looked at the scratch Marcus had made, and I thought about the shoes. Laces tucked in.
Marcus hated tucking his laces. He left them loose always, a habit that drove me genuinely insane for two and a half years.
Whoever had arranged those shoes had done it carefully. Thoughtfully.
Like a person tidying up after themselves.
Or like something that had learned, from watching, what tidy was supposed to look like.
The stove light flickered.
I didn't look at it.
"Not now," I said quietly, to no one, to nothing.
The light steadied.
I finished my coffee.