Chapter 2 - The Burgundy ShoesThe first thing I noticed upon crossing the threshold was not disorder, but its absolute, chilling absence.
Our apartment was immaculate. It was too clean. The kitchen counters shone with a chemical brilliance. The couch cushions stood rigidly upright, bearing no indentations of the people who were supposed to live here. Not a single coffee mug, stray jacket, or unopened envelope had been left out of place. I had fully expected the comfortable, chaotic mess of two men living without the woman of the house for four months. Instead, the rooms looked preserved, sterile, as though no one had truly lived and breathed in them since the day I left for the airport.
I set the grocery bags down on the dining table, the paper crinkling loudly in the quiet room.
That was when my eyes landed on the shoes.
They were positioned neatly beside the baseboard near the front hall closet. They were a pair of low-heeled burgundy pumps, featuring scuffed toes and thin, delicate leather straps. They were too small to fit my feet, and far too old-fashioned to belong to any college-aged friend of Noah's.
For one desperate, fleeting second, my mind scrambled for a logical explanation. Had David purchased them as part of a surprise for me? But as I knelt and lifted one, my thumb pressing into the softened, worn leather, reality set in. These were not new shoes. Someone had walked many miles in them. Someone had lived in them.
The first explanation that entered my mind was the cliché: another woman. An affair.
The second explanation was infinitely worse.
I knew those shoes.
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My younger sister, Rebecca, had worn them to my fiftieth birthday dinner five years ago. I remembered that night perfectly. She had complained that the left heel was coming loose, and David, always the fixer, had promised to repair it for her. Three weeks after that dinner, Rebecca died in a horrific highway accident during a freezing rainstorm while driving Noah home from a school event. She was forty-eight. Noah, trapped in the passenger seat, was only fourteen.
I had not seen those burgundy shoes since the night of her funeral. Holding the shoe against my chest, my heart began to pound a frantic, terrifying rhythm against my ribs.
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