I pushed open the front door and walked out into the afternoon.
The air was cool.
The sky was the particular shade of blue that only happens in the hour before the light starts to change.
I stood on the front step for a moment and breathed it in.
Somewhere across the city, my mother was probably making dinner.
I would call her on the way home.
I would tell her about the hearing, and about the storage unit, and about the notebook, and about the photograph taken outside my old office on a day I couldn’t remember.
I would tell her all of it, because she deserved to know, and because keeping it to myself would mean carrying it alone, and I had learned, in the past two weeks, that Eleanor had carried too much alone for too long.
I was not going to make that mistake.
I walked to my car.
