Chapter 1
My name is Craig Ellison, and the day I came home early from the office was the day I found out what my house had been doing without me.
I had left a folder on the kitchen counter that morning, a set of renewal documents for the Hargrove account that my assistant had been calling about since ten o'clock, and I drove back at eleven-forty with the radio off because I had a headache that had started behind my left eye and was working its way forward. The street was quiet. The neighborhood was quiet. I pulled into the driveway and sat for a moment with my hands still on the wheel, just wanting the headache to decide what it was going to do before I went inside.
The silver Audi parked two houses down was not a car I recognized.
I noticed it the way you notice things that are slightly wrong without being able to say exactly why. Not loud. Not obvious. Just present in a way that made the back of my brain run a quick calculation I could not fully access yet.
I went in through the front door because I always go in through the front door. Fifteen years of coming home to this house, the same lock, the same faint creak of the hinges that I had promised to fix twice and somehow never gotten around to. I picked up the folder from the counter. I noticed Brittany had moved my coffee mug into the cabinet, which she only did when she was expecting someone, because she thought the upside-down mug on the drying rack looked, in her word, domestic.
May you like
I stood in the kitchen for a moment.
The dishwasher was running. The sunlight was moving across the island the way it always did at this hour. Everything in the room was arranged with a kind of careful normalcy that was slightly too careful, the way a room looks when someone has spent twenty minutes making it look like they have not spent twenty minutes making it look normal.
