Chapter 1 — The Shoe Rack

“Jason swore to us they were living apart because of the home repairs. But I don’t see a single pair of men’s shoes in this hallway.”
Ruth said it standing just inside the door of a rented apartment in Canton, a bag of groceries in each arm and a birthday cake balanced on top.

She had driven all the way from Indianapolis to surprise her grandchildren without telling anyone she was coming — and now she was the one standing stunned in a doorway, looking at a shoe rack.

Claire took a few seconds before she answered her mother-in-law. Behind Ruth were the things Ruth was only beginning to see: the peeling paint along the hallway, the stove with one burner that worked, and the shoe rack by the door holding three pairs of shoes and no more.

Thirteen-year-old Owen’s sneakers. Seven-year-old Zoe’s small buckled shoes. And Claire’s own plain work flats. Nothing else. No man’s shoes anywhere.

“Jason doesn’t live here,” Claire said quietly, and stepped aside to let her in. “He left us eight months ago.”

Ruth didn’t move.

She stood frozen just past the threshold, the cake tilting slightly in her hands, trying and failing to make the sentence mean something other than what it plainly meant.

Chapter 2 — The Drawing on the Table

Zoe’s drawing pad was lying open on the living room table, and Claire watched Ruth’s eyes find it.

The little girl had drawn their family. A house with a curl of smoke rising from the chimney.

Her mother in a bright red dress. Owen drawn very tall, the way Zoe always drew her big brother.

Herself, small, with two long braids. And at the very far edge of the page, pushed off to the side and separated from all of them by a wide band of empty white paper, stood her father — sketched faintly in pale gray pencil, with no color at all, as if Zoe had not been able to decide whether to include him or leave him out and had split the difference.

Claire had been in this flat for three months.