We had been married thirty-eight years.

I had known him forty-one.

My life after his death was not empty.

It was simply rearranged around an absence.

Like furniture placed around a space where something important used to stand.

The bookshelf remained in the living room the entire time.

Still leaning left.

I thought about repairing it more than once.

I never did.

Derek eventually became a corporate attorney in Des Moines.

He had Richard’s dark hair and his habit of going quiet whenever he needed to think.

He had inherited some of my directness too.

And, I believed, his father’s basic decency.

I believed that very strongly.

Then he met Morgan Ellis.

Morgan worked in marketing for a commercial real estate company.

She was intelligent, polished, observant, and excellent at remembering details that were useful to her.

From the beginning, she was interested in my house.

There was nothing inherently suspicious about that.

The house was beautiful.

It had been maintained carefully.

At the time of their engagement, it had been appraised at just under seven hundred thousand dollars.

What bothered me wasn’t that Morgan admired it.

It was how she admired it.

She never asked questions like someone trying to understand why a place mattered to the people who lived there.

She asked questions like someone evaluating an asset.

At one dinner, she asked about square footage before asking about the family photographs.

During another visit, she walked slowly from room to room with the focus of someone calculating.

I noticed.

I filed it away.

Then her brother Gavin came to the house.

Derek texted me that morning to say Gavin would stop by and hoped I didn’t mind.

That wasn’t exactly the same thing as asking.

Gavin was a contractor.

The moment he arrived, he began looking at the property with professional eyes.

He tapped walls.

Photographed the foundation.

Inspected the kitchen cabinets.