The Door She Walked Through
The front door opened at exactly 4:30 in the morning, and somehow the sound was quieter than it should have been.
That made it worse.
Claire had been standing barefoot on the kitchen tile long enough that the cold had moved through discomfort and arrived somewhere past it, somewhere that felt close to numbness. She had stopped noticing it. She had stopped noticing a lot of things in the last hour, standing at the stove with the burner turned low, stirring onions she no longer cared about, listening for headlights in the driveway, telling herself the tightness in her chest was just exhaustion.
