She crouched instantly. “I’m right here.”
“Are we sleeping in the car?”
Lena opened her mouth and found nothing to say.
Her husband, Caleb, had died fourteen months earlier in a highway pileup outside Dayton, leaving behind medical bills, a failed roofing business, and a silence that no one in the family ever acknowledged directly. The Whitakers had taken them in afterward, but not with kindness. With conditions. Harold never let Lena forget that the room upstairs was “temporary.” Diane made lists and taped them to the refrigerator. Clean this. Buy that. Don’t touch the mixer. Don’t let Noah watch cartoons in the den. Don’t cry at the table. Don’t mention Caleb too much because it upsets Harold.
June, Lena’s mother, had moved in too after her apartment building was condemned. Three adults, one child, one grief too large for the house, and one pair of in-laws who believed generosity was the same thing as ownership.
