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“Rafe?” She kneas gone from the bed before she opened her eyes She stretched out her hand to the other side, his side

Empty

And then she sat up and switched on the lamp

“Rafe?” She pushed back the covers and got out of the bed

He wasn’t in the bathroo roo room was empty, too

She returned to perch on the edge of the bed and told herself to get back under the covers and go to sleep He’d probably just gone down to the family’s kitchen for a snack He did that now and then

But she found herself feeling a little needy, a little lonely She put her hand on her rounded belly and whispered to her baby, “I want your papa now”

So, then She would go and get hi, she would sit with hiether

She put on her ki the first-floor hall, she turned down another hall to the back stairs, which were narrow, lit by loattage bulbs in the ceiling at each landing and descended at a sharp angle to the lower floor

At the ground floor she stopped on the landing Four more stairs led down into the fainal main kitchen beneath the center of the house The fa room forty years before and updated now and then as the decades went by

But the back stairs didn’t look eways all through Hartmore They reo, when Hartmore was built

She hesitated there on the old, narrow landing, before turning and going the rest of the way down The low light directly overhead cast odd shadows on the ashed wall The kitchen wasn’t visible, not from there, not until she went down those last few stairs and eed from the narrow back hall, which connected to the stairway there

But she could hear soainst a counter

And a

Rafe She couldn’t make out the words, but she knew the sound of his voice, knew it instantly, knew it to her bones, to the deepest core of herself

A woman spoke in a passionate whisper

Genny’s sto out a sick, hard rhythm under her breast

She didn’t want to go down

But she had to go down

Her feet in the little red slippers felt as though they weren’t even connected to the rest of her She looked down and they were , one step, and another