Page 104 of Angels Are Falling

My side was the way I’d left it. That should have been a comfort. Instead, it had the staged, untouched feeling of a model home, the throw pillows in their assigned positions, the surfaces clean of the small evidence of a person. I climbed to our room. The bed was made with hospital corners, which no one in this family had ever once managed on their own. I opened the closet out of habit to hang my jacket and stopped.

Amelie’s side of the closet was empty.

Not messy empty, the way it got when she was packing in a hurry and left half her wardrobe on the floor in protest. Empty empty. The rod was bare. Correction: the shelf I had stuffed with new shoes and purses for her remained untouched. Most of those items were still in their original packaging. But her personal things that we brought from the old house had been swept clean.

For a second, my mind supplied the reasonable explanations before the fear could land. She was having things cleaned. She’d rearranged while I was gone. People rearranged.

I went down the hall to the kids’ rooms. Stripped too. Beds bare, the closets gaping, the small archaeological layers of three childhoods—Bella’s contraband candy stash, August’s sorted-by-color everything, Jamie’s Nintendo—gone.

I stood in the doorway of Bella’s empty room and felt something cold move through me that I refused, for the moment, to name.

They were somewhere. People didn’t just vanish. And there was one part of the house I hadn’t checked, because I’d never once checked it since we moved into this house.

Kai’s side.

When we’d moved in, the arrangement had drawn its own quiet borders, and one of them was that his wing was his. He never told me not to venture inside. I merely respected his unspoken wish for privacy. A man like that needed somewhere the rest of us weren’t and giving him privacy was the least I could do, given everything.

But today, I was far too jarred by the empty welcome. I crossed the large living room and pushed open the door to his side, and for the first time, walked into the place I presumed my wife and siblings had moved into while I was halfway across the world.

I stopped in the hallway as if I’d walked into the wrong house. Because it looked suspiciously like our old home.

What the hell?

I had a fixed idea of what Kai’s side of the house looked like—cold money, glass and steel, the kind of austere wealth that made you feel like a fingerprint on someone’s window—and I preferred the idea to whatever the reality turned out to be.

There was the sofa with the stains, the one Amelie had thrown a blanket over and refused to replace because we couldn’t afford to, and then, later, because it had a story. There was the frayed armchair she liked. The chipped blue bowl she inherited from my late mother. The cabinet with the pencil marks climbing it with Bella’s height. My hand traced the marks and Amelie’s beautiful handwriting.

The walls were warm, the throws colorful. Where my side smelled like nothing, like the inside of a new car, this smelled like cinnamon and cookies and old books. There were photos. Dozens of them, in mismatched frames the way she always hung them, refusing my campaign for a single matched set. The kids at the amusement park with Kai and Amelie. Amelie laughing on a beach with Kai. Amelie and Bella asleep in a pile. None of me. I noticed it the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue, before you decide to keep prodding it.

I stood in the middle of it, turning slowly, and the question came up so absurd I almost laughed.

Why?

The man owned planes. He owned malls. Most of the buildings in this town. He’d spent, casually, on a single dinner more than I used to make in a year, and he hadn’t blinked. He could’ve built anything over here. He could’ve stocked his side with art that cost more than the GDP of small nations. And instead, he’d built this. He’d taken my mediocre, mended, drowning-in-debt old life—the life I’d spent every day trying to claw my way out of, the life I’d been ashamed to let him see across that restaurant table—and he’d reproduced it down to the stains.

It made no sense. You didn’t counterfeit a thing you could buy a thousand times over. You didn’t, with all the money in the world, build a careful little museum of someone else’s ordinary and unremarkable home.

I didn’t get to mull this over. Because at the end of the hall, I heard her.

Chapter

Thirty-One

STEFAN

“I thought you were coming home tomorrow,” Amelie said, and her voice came down the hall ahead of her, bright, warm, lifted at the edges in a way I hadn’t heard it aimed at me in longer than I wanted to count. “Did your meeting get canceled⁠—”

She came around the corner already smiling. A real one, the kind that took over her whole face, the kind I’d married her for. She was barefoot in yoga pants and a blue tank top, her hair down and damp at the ends, and for one suspended second, she was the homecoming I’d rehearsed on the plane, flying toward me across the warm light of a room that looked exactly like the room where I’d fallen in love with her.

I didn’t even think. I crossed the distance and caught her face in both hands and kissed her.

For a heartbeat, she went still under my mouth, and I read it as surprise, as the held breath before she forgave me, and I pressed in, relieved, undone, home. I’m sorry, I tried to say into it. Baby, I’m so sorry. I’m an idiot. I’m here now, I’m⁠—

She didn’t kiss me back.

Her hands had come up to my chest, and they weren’t pulling me in. They were just there, flat, a polite, immovable distance, and her mouth under mine had gone careful and closed. I pulled back far enough to see her, and the smile was gone. Not replaced with anger, which I could’ve worked with. Replaced with nothing I knew how to name. Her eyes flicked past my shoulder down the empty hall, and then back to me, her expression shutting down. I’d kissed her ten thousand times without thinking. This was the first kiss I’d ever taken from her that felt stolen.

“Stefan.” She said my name hesitantly. “You’re back.”