The principal called while I was rinsing Letty’s cereal bowl and trying, for the forty-seventh consecutive morning, not to look at the empty hook by the door where Jonathan’s keys used to hang.
“Piper?” Principal Brennan’s voice was tight in the specific way of someone choosing words carefully because the wrong ones might cause damage. “You need to come in. Now.”
My hand slipped. The bowl hit the edge of the sink and cracked.
“Is Letty okay?”
“She’s safe.” Too fast. “But six men came in together this morning asking for her by name. My secretary called security.”
Three months earlier, a different careful male voice had told me that Jonathan was gone.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“They said they worked with Jonathan. At the plant. The second Letty heard his name she refused to leave the office. Piper, she’s physically safe but everyone in this building is emotional right now. You need to come.”
He hung up.
I stood at the sink with the water still running and looked at my phone and felt the specific fear that grief produces — the fear that never fully goes quiet, that waits near the surface of ordinary mornings for something to pull it back up.
