Chapter 5

If Monday had been bad, Tuesday arrived like it had something to prove.

Ben’s body refused to cooperate with consciousness. He lay sprawled across the mattress, arms and legs flung wide, staring at the ceiling and silently cursing every choice that had led him to believe scrubbing floors and hauling boxes were casual, everyday activities and not, apparently, an Olympic event designed to punish hubris.

With a low groan, he rolled out of bed, every muscle lighting up in protest. He had worked construction in college. He ran. He hiked. He had always thought of himself as active, durable, someone who could bounce back from a hard day with nothing more than a sore shoulder and a good night’s sleep.

At thirty-three, he still thought of himself as young.

His knees, however, had filed a formal complaint. He rubbed at the dull ache in his lower back and made a mental note to take it easier. Today would be calm, he decided. Reasonable. Low stress. He would do a few hours of actual work, clean out the refrigerator, sand the plaster patches on the walls, and go to the grocery store because granola bars were not, in fact, a complete diet.

An hour later, he was standing in the middle of his living room, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes and very much not calm.

He could not find his laptop.

He checked the car first, then the kitchen, then the bedroom, then the spare rooms. He opened drawers and peered into places that had never held a computer in their lives. He even called his brother, voice edged with irritation, just in case he had somehow walked off with it.

“What is wrong with me?” he asked the empty room when that turned up nothing, already beginning to develop the unsettling habit of narrating his own breakdown.

He retraced every step from the day before. He came up with nothing.

Which was how he ended up in the garage, sweating through his T-shirt as he tore through boxes with growing desperation. He had used the laptop the night before he moved in. Logically, it could not be in any of these boxes, but logic was starting to feel flimsy. The computer was expensive. It was his livelihood. Every document he needed lived inside that thin, infuriatingly absent machine.

Hungry and irritated, Ben finally gave up and stomped back into the house, deciding food was the only thing that might keep him from throwing something. He made it into the kitchen and stopped dead.

On the island, sitting neatly in the open as it had always been there, was his computer bag.

His laptop was inside.

The same island he had checked. More than once.

He stared at it for a long moment, the irritation draining into something quieter and less comfortable, then forced out a breath and gave a slight shrug.

“Guess I missed it,” he muttered, because that was the only explanation that made any sense at all. He was tired. His body hurt. His brain was clearly fried. Of course, he had overlooked something obvious.

Except the explanation didn’t sit right.

It stayed with him as he worked through the afternoon, nagging at the back of his mind while he sanded walls and wiped down shelves and drove to the store for groceries. He could picture himself in the kitchen earlier, the way he had checked the counters, the way he had stood right there by the island, already irritated, already searching.

The bag had not been there.

He told himself it was the house. It was too big, too full of corners and surfaces compared to his old apartment. Things were easier to misplace in small spaces. He would just have to be more careful now, more organized.

There wasn’t another explanation, after all.

Things did not simply move around the house on their own.

And yet, as he set the groceries down beside his mysteriously rediscovered laptop, a thin thread of unease wound itself quietly through his thoughts, refusing to be ignored.