Chapter 3 - The Empty House on Maple Street
The rental house they lived in on Maple Street in Oakley was a seventy-year-old bungalow with uneven floors, a front porch that needed three coats of exterior latex paint, and a drafty living room where the radiator hissed like an angry cat every time the furnace kicked on.
It wasn't Mason, Ohio. It didn't have crown molding, or a three-car garage, or a professionally landscaped front lawn with stone retaining walls.
But when Hannah unlocked the front door and carried Ellie inside into the warm, familiar smell of cinnamon tea and old cedar, the silence didn't feel heavy. It felt like an exhale.
“Are we staying here for Christmas, Mommy?” Ellie asked as Hannah unwrapped the damp green velvet dress and pulled a soft cotton dinosaur sleeper over her head.
“We’re staying right here, baby,” Hannah said, her voice steady now, hardened by the forty-minute drive through the dark. “Just you and me.”
“And Daddy?”
Hannah paused, her hands resting on the zipper of the sleeper. The silence in the small hallway seemed to stretch out, filling the space between the coat rack and the shoe basket.
“Daddy has some things to take care of at Grandma’s,” Hannah said carefully, keeping her tone light. “He’ll be a while.”
She put Ellie to bed in her own room, reading two chapters of Make Way for Ducklings by the dim light of a star-shaped nightlight until the little girl’s breathing slowed into the deep, rhythmic cadence of absolute childhood exhaustion.
Downstairs, the kitchen was cold.
Hannah turned on the single overhead light above the chipped porcelain sink and looked at her reflection in the small windowpane over the faucet.
The left side of her face was bruised in a neat, four-fingered pattern across the cheekbone. The skin was already turning a dull, purplish gray against her fair complexion, swelling slightly where Judith’s heavy gold signet ring had caught her during the swing.
It was an ugly mark. But looking at it didn't make her cry anymore. It made her feel cold. Like someone had taken a blowtorch and burned away every remaining illusion she had carried about marriage, family loyalty, and the polite suburban theater that the Millers had forced her to perform in for six long years.
She walked into the living room, sat down on the old corduroy sofa that they had bought off Facebook Marketplace when they first moved to Cincinnati, and stared at the small three-foot artificial Christmas tree sitting on the end table.
It didn't have twelve-foot garlands. It didn't have white lights imported from Germany or hand-blown glass ornaments from a boutique in Hyde Park.
It had a string of multi-colored LED bulbs they’d bought at Target for eight dollars and a papier-mâché star that Ellie had glued together at daycare using too much glitter and a whole tube of Elmer’s glue.
It was real. And it was theirs.
At 7:15 PM, the front door rattled.
The key turned in the lock with a familiar, heavy click, and Ryan pushed his way into the hallway, his shoulders hunched against the cold, his breath pluming in the unheated entryway. He looked like a man who had just walked through a war zone and was carrying all the mud on his boots.
“Hannah?” he called out, his voice echoing nervously through the small rooms. “Babe? Are you awake?”
Hannah didn't get up from the sofa. She sat with her legs tucked under her blanket, watching the doorway as Ryan stepped into the living room.
He stopped dead when he saw her face.
May you like
The color drained right out of his cheeks, leaving him looking pasty and small under the overhead light. He took two slow steps forward, his hands raised slightly in a defensive, pleading gesture.
“Jesus Christ, Hannah,” he whispered, staring at the bruise on her cheekbone. “I... I didn’t realize she hit you that hard.”
