The first week alone was not peaceful. It was loud with absence.
I walked through rooms that still held the indentations of Sloan's habits — an empty nail in the bathroom wall where her robe hook had been, a pale rectangle on the fridge where her meal-prep schedule had been taped, the faint ghost of her perfume in the master bedroom curtains I washed twice and then replaced. I slept in the master again, on sheets I bought new, and woke at three in the morning reaching for Walter and finding only the clean flat truth of a bed that belonged to me.
I cried once, on the third night, not for Sloan and not exactly for Harrison, but for the version of motherhood I had believed was endless patience, and for the education it had taken me sixty-five years and eighteen thousand dollars to complete.
The first payment arrived on day twenty-nine, three hundred dollars via transfer to the new account, with a note from Harrison that read only: Installment 1. As agreed.
I did not reply with warmth. I replied with a receipt.
Sloan, according to a mutual friend who delivered gossip the way some people deliver casseroles, told anyone who would listen that I had burned her bag in a psychotic break and invented a theft to justify throwing them out. Harrison, according to the same friend, said less and looked worse. I planted tulips in the front beds Walter had always meant to expand. I went back to the gallery. I attended book club and did not mention my son except to say he was fine, which was a lie shaped like a courtesy.
Winter came. The roof I had worried about held. I paid a contractor out of a different fund and climbed the ladder once myself, against advice, to see the shingles up close because I had learned that year what happened when I let other people handle what was mine without watching.