He chuckled. “Very funny, Jo. Help me bring these bags inside.” I didn’t move.

PART 3: The Woman at the Gate

“Did you hear me?” Roger asked. “Yes. I heard you.”

I glanced beyond his shoulder. Patty’s front curtain twitched.

She had heard him too, through the open line of the phone still resting on my windowsill.

“I believe you’re confusing a marriage with a hotel reservation,” I said. Roger picked up his case, stepped forward, and stopped when he saw the unfamiliar brass lock on the door.

“What happened to the old deadbolt?”
“I replaced it.”

“You can’t change the locks on our house.”

I stepped onto the porch and closed the door gently behind me. “That’s the thing, Roger. It’s no longer our house.”

He stared. Behind his confident expression I watched an idea beginning to form and then be rejected because it didn’t fit the story he had told himself.

In that story, I had spent four months waiting in an empty house, holding his place at the table.