Chapter 6

I showed Caleb the frame the next morning.

He came to the rented room because I told him I had something to show him, and because he still answered when I called, even if he sounded tired of me. He stood in the doorway with his coat still on. The room was cold. The radiator knocked.

I handed him my phone.

He looked at the still for a long time. Deborah standing over me. The table on its side. My gray dress dark with blood. My face turned toward the camera.

“This doesn’t prove she pushed you,” he said.

“It proves she was there before Rae.”

“She says she came in when she heard the crash.”

“Then why did she delete the clips?”

“She didn’t delete anything. She said the system did an automatic wipe.”

“Caleb.”

“She said you were on pain medication and confused.” He handed the phone back. “She said Rae has been unstable for months. She said Rae probably pushed you and then panicked and called her.”

“Rae didn’t call her. Deborah brought Rae in.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I was on the floor. I heard her.”

“You were bleeding. You were in shock.”

“I heard her.”

He looked at me then, and I saw the war in him. He wanted to believe me. He also wanted his mother to be his mother. Deborah had been the one who held him at his father’s funeral. Deborah had been the one who kept the business open and the casseroles coming and the town’s sympathy turned into something useful. If Deborah was a liar, then his whole life was a room with the furniture moved.

“Maybe you should go to your mother’s,” he said. “Just until the baby comes.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Laney, you’re thirty weeks pregnant. You’re living over a hardware store. You don’t have a job. You don’t have a car. You don’t have any family here.”

“I have you.”

He looked away.

“Caleb.”

“I don’t know what I have,” he said.

He left. I sat on the twin bed with my hand on my belly and listened to his truck start in the alley below. He did not look up.

Deborah fired me that afternoon by text. She said the office manager position had been eliminated due to restructuring. She said my keys were no longer valid. She said she would mail my personal items. She also told the family that I had become unstable and was spreading lies because I was jealous of her relationship with Caleb.

Rae was evicted from the garage apartment the same day. Deborah moved her into the front bedroom of the house on Sycamore, the one with the window that faced the street, so the whole town could see that Rae was home and being cared for. Milo stayed in the room next to Deborah.

I went to the grocery store for crackers and ginger ale and heard two women in the produce aisle talking about me. They said I had fallen. They said it was a shame. They said Deborah was a saint to keep the daughter-in-law’s job open as long as she did.

I did not correct them. I was learning.

That night, Rae texted me from a number I did not recognize. One line: “She watches me sleep.”