The Empty House

  Chapter Seven

Sharon didn't remember the drive.

She remembered the wipers, the red lights smeared across the windshield, and her own hands locked on the wheel at ten and two. She remembered counting the hours on the dashboard clock. When the iron gates of her house finally rose out of the rain, there were still three hours until midnight.

Vivian hadn't waited.

Two moving trucks sat in the driveway with their ramps down. Floodlights blazed across the lawn, turning the rain to white needles. A locksmith knelt at the gate keypad with a screwdriver in his teeth, and he didn't even look up as she braked.

Sharon got out and walked past him. Nobody stopped her. Nobody thought she was worth stopping.

On the lawn, in the mud, sat her life.

Her mother's piano, uncovered, with rain pooling in the open lid. The velvet armchair she had saved eight months to buy. A tangle of curtains she had hemmed by hand, now dragged through the grass like something that had drowned. Two men carried a mirror between them, and her own face slid past her in the glass, pale and small and soaked.

 Don't cry. Not in front of them.

She moved toward the porch. Through the open front door, she could see the hall she had decorated, the staircase where she had once imagined children, and the cellar door at the far end standing wide, its lock hanging broken.

"Well, look who came crawling back."

Michael leaned against the doorframe, a champagne flute dangling from two fingers. His shirt was half unbuttoned, his eyes glassy and bright. A bruise from her belt still showed at his collar, and somehow it only made him more pleased with himself.

"Did you come to help?" he asked. Behind him, three of Vivian's men turned to watch. "Take your piano, sweetheart. I'd hate for it to get wet."

"Michael." Her voice came out thin. "You can't sell this house. You signed the..."

"I signed whatever I wanted." He laughed and swayed. "Turns out a man can do anything when somebody believes in him." He raised his glass toward the dark windows upstairs. "Vivian believes in me. Eight years with you, and you never once looked at me like that."

Sharon's stomach twisted. He truly believed it. He stood in the wreckage of his own ruin, grinning, because a woman had flattered him.

He has no idea. He has no idea she's using him.

"Look at her," Michael said to the men, and he waved his glass up and down her body. "Look how she's standing. Like she's about to climb a horse." He bowed his legs and waddled a few steps across the porch. "Eight years I had to walk next to that. Do you know how embarrassing that was?"

One of the men snorted. Another laughed out loud.

The sound went through Sharon like a blade. For a second the whole yard seemed to tilt. She was nineteen again, standing at her own engagement party with her skirt pulled down over her knees, listening to Michael's friends laugh. She was twenty-five, hiding in the bathroom, practicing how to walk so no one would see. She was thirty, unable to wear the dress she wanted, because you'll make a fool of yourself, Sharon.

Every humiliation she had ever swallowed rose in her throat at once, and she stood frozen in the floodlight, with the rain running into her eyes, unable to move.

"Get out of my way," she finally whispered, and tried to walk past him.

"No."

His hand hit her chest. It wasn't a slap this time. It was a shove, hard and careless, the way you push a stray dog off a step.

Sharon fell backward down the porch stairs and landed in the mud with a sickening crack. Pain tore through her tailbone. The air left her lungs. Cold water soaked her coat, her hair, her skin, and the champagne glass shattered beside her head.

She lay there on her back, staring up into the rain.

Somewhere above her, men were laughing. Somewhere, a piano was slowly filling with water.

For one terrible moment, she wanted to stay. Just close her eyes and let the cold take her. She had been so tired for so long, in two lives, and she had thought dying once would be enough.

Take what's yours and run.

Her grandmother's whisper cut through the dark. Thin, dry, and stubborn as a root.

Sharon's fingers curled into the mud. Not this time.

She rolled to her side and pushed herself up on shaking arms. Rain streamed down her face, and mud streaked her coat, and she didn't wipe either. She stood up, slowly, with her feet planted wider than they had ever stood before.

Michael had stopped laughing.

"You're pathetic," he muttered, but it sounded weaker than before.

"Perhaps," Sharon said quietly. "But I'm still standing, and you're standing in my house."

For the first time that night, something flickered across his face. It was fear, small and quick, the look of a man who felt the ground shift and didn't know why. The men behind him shifted their weight and found other things to look at.

Sharon could have told him everything. She could have told him that the woman he adored had once traded him away in her mind, that Vivian was only using him. But she held her tongue. Let him keep his champagne. Let him keep his lie. It would be worth more to her later.

She turned her back on the house, on the piano and the curtains and the lit windows, and walked toward her car. Every step hurt. She did not look back, because she knew that if she did, she would never leave.

It's only a house. It's only walls.

But it was where she had planted roses. It was where she had waited up on cold nights, hoping he would come home kind. Her throat closed around the grief, and she let it, because there was no one left to see.

She had her hand on the car door when headlights swept across the lawn.

A police cruiser rolled through the open gate, its lights dark but its engine low and deliberate. Behind it came a white van with no markings, and behind that, a taxi.

Sharon's pulse stumbled.

The taxi door opened first. Aunt Helen stepped out in her best wool coat, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, her eyes already wet. She looked, Sharon realized with a sickening lurch, like a woman who had rehearsed in the mirror.

"Officers, that's her," Helen sobbed. "That's my niece. Oh, my poor girl. I told you she wasn't well."

Two officers climbed out of the cruiser. From the van stepped a thin man in a gray jacket, holding a clipboard against his chest as though it were a shield.

"Mrs. Sharon Ashford?" he said gently. "I'm Dr. Hale. We have an emergency order for a psychiatric evaluation, signed this evening."

Sharon stared at him. "On what grounds?"

"Your family has submitted a petition." He glanced at the page. "Stockpiling, paranoia, a sudden withdrawal from loved ones, and repeated statements about the end of the world."

Across the lawn, Michael's mouth curved. Slowly, deliberately, he raised his champagne glass in a toast.

And Sharon understood.

Every wall she had raised, every ton of rice, every barrel of fuel and every receipt she had so carefully kept was not a shield. It was evidence. Vivian had not needed to stop her preparations. She had only needed to prove they were madness.

One of the officers stepped forward and closed his hand around her arm.

"Ma'am," he said, "please come with us."

Twelve days before the world ended, they were going to lock her away.