Every hair on my arms rose at once. Our son, Michael, was thirty and living on the other side of an ocean. Our daughter, Emma, was twenty-eight, three states away in the condo she’d just closed on. Neither of them had children. Neither of them was in this house. So whoever Greg was rocking to sleep downstairs, whoever had just been called “sweetheart” in that aching, tender voice — I had no name for them. And somehow, impossibly, they were calling my husband Daddy.
I turned toward his nightstand out of old habit, as if his phone might explain something. It sat charging, screen flickering once with some forgettable notification, then going dark again. Whatever was happening below me had nothing to do with a phone.
Then I heard it: the deadbolt on the back door turning. A single, deliberate click. The door opened. A few seconds of night air seemed to breathe into the house. Then the door closed again, just as quietly as it had opened.
