Chapter 9: The House Again text
When the scene was fully released and the locks replaced, Clara walked every room with me.
She opened the office door—repaired, repainted, no longer a barrier—and stood for a long time without speaking. Then she boxed the remaining files for her attorney’s office and put a lamp where the darkness had been. “I’m not moving,” she said. “I’m not letting them turn my address into a story I have to abandon.”
“Good,” I said.
May you like
She slept at her own place that week with a security service on a temporary contract and a check-in call to me each night that we both pretended was about logistics. Liam’s visits resumed their adjusted rhythm. Evan’s communications stayed inside the legal channel. The pickup did not reappear on the block.
I finished the gutters on my own house on a Saturday, the same ladder, a different silence. When Clara’s morning-call voice came through the phone that week, it still carried fatigue, but the careful heaviness about packing things away had shifted into something more like planning. Planning was allowed. Fear no longer got to monopolize the schedule.
