The water was already running when I opened the front door.
Not dripping.
Running.
I stood on the porch with my key still in the lock, listening to it rush somewhere inside the house. A steady, heavy hiss, like a shower left on in an empty hotel room.
Before I took another step, I knew Brian had left me something to find.
“Brian?” I called.
Silence.
Just the water.
I should tell you that I almost didn’t come that day. I sat in my car at the end of the driveway for twenty minutes first, with the engine running and both hands on the wheel, looking at the house.
It was a pale yellow two-story with white shutters and a red front door. I picked that door color. Brian said red was “a lot.” I said a house should look like somebody happy lives there. He rolled his eyes, but he painted it anyway, one Saturday in April, eight years ago, while I held the ladder and handed him things and we argued about whether the radio should play country or classic rock.
We’d bought that house together when we were twenty-nine. We’d been married for two years. We’d been so proud of it that we took a picture of ourselves on the front steps holding the keys up to the camera like a trophy.
That picture was in a box somewhere now. Or in a landfill. I didn’t know which. I’d stopped asking about the boxes months ago.
My divorce from Brian had dragged through the courts for almost eight months before the judge finally awarded me the house.
Brian had two weeks to move out.
His deadline had expired the day before. I’d waited an extra day on purpose. I didn’t want to risk pulling into the driveway and seeing his truck still there. I didn’t want to watch him carry out the last of his things and look at me the way he’d been looking at me for a year. Like I was a stain he couldn’t scrub off.
So I gave it one more day.
Then I drove over, sat in my car for twenty minutes, walked up to my red front door, and turned the key. 