“Emily?”
Nothing.
“Jack.”
Nothing.
I went back up to the second floor, slowly, because my knee is bad on stairs in the morning.
Both beds made. Properly made, with the comforters pulled up, which those children do not do and which meant an adult had done it on the way out the door.
Backpacks gone off the hooks. Jackets gone. Emily’s little denim one with the patches gone.
And in the master bedroom at the end of the hall, the closet door was standing open and the two big suitcases that normally sit on the shelf above the hanging clothes were not there.
I came back downstairs with a strange, floating kind of calm. The kind that gets there before the pain has figured out where to put its hands.
