I decided to walk past the blue house casually, like a person who walked on Arden Street regularly and had no specific agenda.
I did not walk on Arden Street regularly. I had no casual reason to be there. It was two streets over and slightly uphill and the pavement had a crack running through it that I had tripped on once in 2021 while distracted by an argument with Paul that I could no longer remember the content of. Only the crack. Only the specific lurch of my ankle.
I went anyway at two in the afternoon, which at least had the advantage of looking like errands rather than surveillance.
The black car was still outside the blue house. Closer up it was a Honda, sensible and forgettable, with a Vermont plate and a crack in the rear bumper that had been there long enough to rust slightly at the edges. There was a cardboard air freshener hanging from the mirror shaped like a pine tree, which felt like the most normal detail I had encountered all week and therefore made me distrust it immediately.
I walked past at a pace I felt was convincingly natural.
I made it maybe fifteen feet past the front gate before the door opened.
"Mrs. Calloway."
I stopped. I turned around. I did not jump, which I'm counting.
Carla Venn looked about forty, maybe a few years less, in the way of people who sleep properly and drink enough water and carry some specific weight behind their eyes that cancels out the rest. The coat was gray today. Different coat, same commitment to wearing it. She was standing on the porch with a mug, not smiling this time, just watching me with the expression of someone who had expected exactly this.
"You called me," I said.
"I did."
"From a disconnected number."
"I use a burner." She said it like it was obvious. "Come in. I have things to show you and I'd rather not do it on the porch where your neighbor photographs everything with her phone."
I looked back toward Nora's house reflexively. Then felt annoyed that I had.
"I don't know you," I said.
"You Googled me this morning. You called your sister. You found the Hesswick connection." She wrapped both hands around her mug. "You know enough. Come in."
I went in. In my defense, I want it noted that every rational instinct I had said not to, and I went in anyway, which is either bravery or a character flaw and I have stopped trying to determine which.
The inside of the blue house looked like someone had moved in with the specific intention of moving out again soon. A couch. A table. A laptop. Boxes stacked against one wall that had not been unpacked, not because of laziness but because of deliberateness. Nothing hung on the walls except one thing: a corkboard, large, covered in photographs and printed documents and strings of red thread connecting various points.
I stood in front of it for a long moment.
My name was on it. Several times. So were Glen's and Paul's and Marcus's. So was a name I didn't recognize: Tobias Reyn, with a photograph of a man I had never seen, mid-forties, standing on a dock that was not Dunhaven's dock.
So was a symbol I had seen before. Drawn in the margins of a notebook Paul had left behind that I had thrown away without fully looking at because something about opening it had felt wrong in a way I couldn't explain.
"Sit down," Carla said from behind me.
I sat on the couch, which had a throw blanket on it that was the only soft thing in the room.
She sat across from me on a folding chair like she had planned the seating arrangement in advance, which she probably had.
"My husband was Owen Farrow," she said. "Hesswick, 2017. He disappeared from our lake house on a Tuesday night in October. No body. No evidence. I was the only one there."
"I know," I said. "My sister found it."
"I know she did. I have a flag on my insurance file." Carla's expression didn't shift. "After Owen I started researching. Not grief research. Not closure research. The other kind." She nodded toward the corkboard. "It took me two years to find the pattern and another year to believe it and another year after that to find you."
"The pattern," I said.
"Women. Specifically widowed women in coastal towns, always odd disappearances, always no evidence, always some small inexplicable detail." She held up one finger. "Owen's watch. Left on the kitchen counter, wound tight, despite the fact that it was a digital watch with no winding mechanism." Another finger. "Tobias Reyn, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 2015. His wife found every clock in the house stopped at the exact same time. Every single one. Including the one on the microwave that had been blinking twelve since they moved in."
I said nothing.
"Marcus's shoes," she said.
"That detail isn't in the public report."
"I know people who know people." She put her mug down. "Mrs. Calloway. Meredith. I'm not here because I think you killed your husbands."
"Then what do you think."
She looked at me for a long moment with the expression of someone choosing which version of a thing to say.
"I think something found you," she said. "And I think it's been keeping you."
The throw blanket on the couch shifted.
There was no one near it. I was sitting on the far end. Carla was on the folding chair. The blanket moved in a slow gather, like something underneath it adjusting its position, except there was nothing underneath it. I could see the flat couch cushion on either side.
Carla looked at it.
Then at me.
"Does that happen to you often," she said, and for the first time her voice had a crack in it, small and quickly plastered over, but there.
"Define often," I said.
She picked her mug back up. I noticed her hands were not entirely steady.
Mine were. Which was either a good sign or the worst possible one.
Outside, somewhere down the street, Senator barked once.
One block over, in a direction I knew without looking, my house sat quiet in the afternoon. Kettle cold. Stove light off. Waiting.
Carla Venn had a corkboard full of dead men and red thread and she had driven from Vermont to find me.
And whatever was in my walls had just followed me two streets uphill to a house it had never been in before, to move a blanket, to remind me it was there.
I finished the thought I'd been avoiding all day.
It wasn't haunting me.
It was with me.