Chapter 3 - The Empty Table
The car ride back to our house felt longer than the five-year mortgage we were still paying off.
When I pulled the Subaru into the driveway, the front of the house looked normal enough—the autumn mums in their terracotta pots by the garage, the welcome mat that said Home is where the coffee is. But the windows were different. The blinds in the front room were drawn halfway down, sealing off the interior like an uncooperative eye.
I didn't turn off the engine right away. I sat there with my hands on the leather steering wheel, listening to the cooling fan tick under the hood.
What was waiting inside? Mia’s voice on the phone had been thin, stripped of all its usual bounce. She hadn't cried while talking to me—she was twelve, old enough to know that crying over a birthday party makes you feel like a child again, but young enough that the restraint cost her more than tears would have.
I opened the front door with my key, the brass latch turning with a familiar, heavy click.
The house smelled of burnt caramel and expensive vanilla candle wax—Zoe’s room-spray, imported from the boutique downtown.
"Melissa?" I called out.
From the kitchen, there was the sound of a cupboard door closing too hard. Melissa appeared in the archway, her apron still on, her hair pinned back in a loose twist that had a few strands coming free. She looked tired, but not the tired of someone who had spent four hours entertaining twelve children. She looked like someone who had just finished a difficult negotiation.
"You're back," she said. Her voice was flat, devoid of the usual greeting cadence. "Where are the chairs?"
"I left them at the shop," I said, stepping across the threshold and dropping my keys into the copper bowl on the hall table. "Mia called me, Mel. What happened?"
Melissa crossed her arms, her fingers digging into her elbows. "Nothing happened, Scott. It was a misunderstanding with the numbers. Zoe had some girls over from her dance troupe—unexpectedly—and the living room was already at capacity. I had to make a call."
"You turned Lily away?"
"I didn't turn her away. I told them it was too full."
"She was standing on the porch with a present, Melissa." My voice didn't rise; it dropped into that quiet register that usually meant trouble in our house. "She's twelve. She's been coming here for half her life."
"And Zoe lives here every day," Melissa snapped back, her eyes flashing with that sudden, defensive heat that always appeared whenever Zoe’s social life was weighed against anything else. "Do you have any idea what it’s like for her at that school? Her friends are sophisticated. They aren't interested in paper plate games and punch bowls. When they showed up early to help set up the photo booth, I couldn't just tell them to leave on the street while we waited for children who might not even show up."
"What do you mean, might not even show up?"
Melissa turned her head away, her gaze fixing on the framed print of a Tuscan olive grove hanging by the coat rack. "Mia’s friends didn't RSVP properly. You know how Jessica is—she's disorganized. By two o'clock, nobody else had arrived. It was just Zoe's group. I had to pivot."
"Pivot," I repeated. The word tasted like tin. "You pivoted by locking Mia's best friend out of her own birthday?"
"Go upstairs and talk to her if you want," Melissa said, her voice dropping into a hard, defensive whisper. "She's been sitting on her bed staring at the wall for twenty minutes. She won't talk to me. Maybe she'll talk to you, since you seem to think I planned a tragedy."
I didn't answer. I walked past her, the third step on the stairs giving its familiar pop under my boots, and headed down the short hallway to Mia’s room.
The door was closed. A strip of yellow light showed underneath the crack.
I raised my knuckles to knock, but before I could touch the wood, I heard Mia inside. She wasn't crying. She was talking to someone in a low, rhythmic murmur—the way she used to talk to her stuffed bear when she was six, lining them all up to tell them about a stray cat she’d seen by the creek.
"One," she whispered. "Two... three, four, five, six."
I pushed the door open.
Mia was sitting on the edge of her quilt, still wearing the pale blue dress. In her lap lay six small white cards with silver borders, arranged in a neat, symmetrical row like headstones in a very small, very quiet cemetery.
LILY
CHLOE
MAYA
SAMANTHA
BRINLEY
ZOE
Wait.
I stared at the last card. The name ZOE was written in thick, heavy black marker—not silver gel pen like the others. And it had been added later. The ink was still slightly dull where the marker had caught the grain of the heavy cardstock.
May you like
Mia looked up when the floorboard creaked. Her eyes were dry, wide, and entirely too old for a face that still had a light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
"Dad," she said quietly. "Did I do something wrong to the others too?"
