of hours ago. While I was making the brownies? You were reading on the sofa. He came through the room and said hello to you.”
Thalia shook her head slowly back and forth and said, “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Laurel said. “I’m positive. He’s been working in the basement. I took him his dinner down there.”
“The invisible husband,” Thalia said.
Laurel cocked her head to the side and said, “You don’t get it. He’s being nice, Thalia. He’s got a deadline at work, and the last thing he needs is more stress, but I went and got you anyway. He’s making room and not fighting with you. It’s like a present he’s giving me.”
“Big man, eh?” Thalia said. She cocked her head, too, same angle, mirroring Laurel. “Give me that brownie.”
“No,” Laurel said. She was already walking toward the stairs down to the basement, but Thalia intercepted her, gripping the other side of the plate. Laurel didn’t let go of her side.
“I can be a big man and give you a present, too.” Thalia tugged gently at the plate, and when Laurel still held on, she stopped tugging and spoke in a voice so subdued she hardly sounded like herself. “I’ve missed you, Bug. Let me make peace.”
Laurel let go, but as Thalia started down the stairs, Laurel couldn’t help calling after her, “Please be nice.”
Thalia paused on the top step and said, “I’ll be fluffy as a bunny tail, sweet as cotton candy. Head on out. I won’t be a minute.”
She went down with the brownie held in front of her in both hands, as if it were a shield or a sacrifice.
Thalia had said to go on out, but Laurel didn’t want to. Not alone. She crossed the room, intending to close the curtain and wait, but paused with her hand on the cloth, peering out at her yard. She hadn’t set foot in it since the police had escorted her whole family over to the Coes’ house. She hadn’t looked at it, even, since she’d stood by Daddy, staring at that knothole.
The patio lights were turned off, and the bulb was still out in the light over the gazebo, but Thalia had lit all the citronella candles around its railing. She’d set up the card table in the gazebo, too. It had been Laurel’s idea to do this outside. Out there, it already felt like something gone rotten, and she didn’t want to invite that rot into the house. But she’d meant the patio, not way out in the corner between the knothole and Shelby’s small pet cemetery. The gazebo glowed in the candlelight, and she could feel the presence of the board there like a pull.
She slid open the glass door and stepped out as gingerly as a cat, as if she weren’t sure that the tile was solid and would hold her. She could feel a wedge of sweltering Florida air shoving its way through the open door into her keeping room. She closed the door behind her.
The opening in the curtain let a narrow rectangle of yellow light spill onto her patio. The pool lights were out, all of them, but as her eyes adjusted, she could see a faint pale mist rising off the water.
She wrapped her arms around herself, tight, hands clasping her own shoulders. The night air was thick with heat and moisture, but her skin felt clammy, and gooseflesh broke out down the backs of her arms.
She stepped over the low fence, Shelby’s dammit, onto the grass. The board waited for her under the gazebo, and she walked toward it as if she had been beckoned. She could smell chlorine and, under that, the musk of Florida in late summer. It was a green and mossy smell, faint and familiar. The cicadas and frogs and crickets were all talking to one another, a night sound that was such a constant that from inside the house, it was white noise, like the hum of the air conditioner. Out here in the dark, it sounded louder, a buzzing chorus underscoring a larger silence. There were no human noises except her own: her feet bending the grass, the thump of her heart, her own hard breathing.
She skirted the pool’s high iron fence. The flickering candles perched on the gazebo’s rail made an evenly spaced circle of light. With the card table set up on the wood floor, there was just enough room for Laurel to sit down on the bench and then slide past the corner