Not a question.

“I didn’t.”

She looked at the house from the outside, at the side door with my key in it, at the brass handle Marcus had polished with his thumb.

“It looks like yours now,” she said.

“It didn’t look like yours on Wednesday.

Why didn’t it look like yours?”

I said I had been waiting for somebody to tell me it was all right to stand in my own kitchen.

She laughed once, not unkindly, then reached into her pocket and held out a key of her own, the old one, the one that went with the keypad code she had been given.