Camryn had a way of holding a fork like she'd never seen one before.
"Is this the fancy one?" she asked at breakfast, turning it over in the light. "Dario, is this the fancy silverware?"
It was a fork from Target. I'd bought a whole set of them two years ago because the good silverware went in the dishwasher and came out spotted. I said nothing. I drank my coffee black and watched her set it down like it might bite her.
Later that same week, I caught her checking the label inside her borrowed blouse — my blouse — angling it toward the window so she could read the tag. When she saw me watching, her face did something fast, a flicker, and then it softened into confusion. "I don't know what half these brands even are," she said. "Back home we just wore whatever fit."
I'd seen her Google the same brand two nights before. I'd been standing right behind her on the stairs.
I started a folder on my phone. I locked it with a code that wasn't our anniversary. I didn't know yet what I was building. I only knew that every time Dario opened his mouth to explain her away, I wanted a copy of his voice saying it.
"You're doing that thing again," he told me on Wednesday, when I asked Camryn — politely, so politely — to leave my razor in my own drawer. "That thing where you make a person feel two inches tall over nothing."
"It's my razor, Dario."
"It's a razor." He said it like I'd accused her of a felony. "She didn't grow up with her own bathroom. She shared one with three brothers. You want her to ask permission for a plastic razor?"
I looked at him for a long moment. "I want her to ask permission for anything," I said, and walked away before my voice could do something I'd regret.
The earrings went missing on a Thursday.
I noticed because I'd been looking at the jewelry box more often now, a habit I hated in myself, checking on my own grandmother's things like a woman guarding a safe. The pearls were gone from their little velvet slot. I told myself I'd misplaced them. I told myself that for exactly one day.
On Friday night, at the dinner table, Camryn tucked her hair behind her ear to reach for the salt, and there they were. My grandmother's pearls, small and yellowed with age, swinging against skin that wasn't mine.
"Those are my grandmother's," I said. I kept my voice flat. I was proud of that, afterward — how flat I kept it.
Camryn's hand flew to her ear like she'd been burned. "Oh — I didn't — Dario said —"
"She admired them, Milena." Dario didn't even look up from his plate. "Is that a crime? She grew up with nothing. What does it cost you?"
What does it cost you. I turned the phrase over in my head the way you turn over a stone to see what's living underneath it.
"Excuse me," I said, and went to the bathroom.
I didn't cry. I stood at the sink and ran the water so it would sound like I was doing something normal, and then I cracked the door an inch and lifted my phone and took three photographs of Camryn at the table, laughing at something Dario said, my grandmother's pearls catching the light over her collarbone. I saved them to the locked folder. I didn't know yet what a jury would think of pearls. I only knew I wanted proof that this had happened, in case I ever needed to prove to myself that it had.
It was almost one in the morning three nights later when I gave up trying to sleep in the guest room and went downstairs for water. The house was dark except for the hall light Dario always left on. Their door — my door, I still thought of it that way, stupidly — stood open a few inches.
I heard Camryn's voice first, low, unguarded, nothing like dinner-table Camryn. "Baby, hand me my phone."
And then Dario laughed. A real laugh. I hadn't heard that laugh directed at me in over a year.
"Elyse drew a horse today," Camryn said. "Sent it to my mom's phone. Looks more like a dog with a neck problem."
"She gets that from you," Dario said, and there was warmth in it, actual warmth, the kind he used to save for me.
I should have moved. I didn't.
"How much longer," Camryn said, quieter now, and I heard the bed shift.
"Not long." A pause. Ice against glass. "Mortgage is clear. Policy's active." Another pause, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something almost bored, almost easy, like he was reading off a grocery list. "One bad night on the pass and we're set for life."
I didn't gasp. I didn't drop anything. I stood very still in the hallway with my hand flat against the wall, and I made myself walk backward, one careful step at a time, until the carpet swallowed the sound of my feet.
I sat down at the kitchen island in the dark. My hands were shaking so badly it took me two tries to unlock my phone.
I opened my messages and found Maggie's name.
I need your help.
I sent it before I could think better of it, before I could talk myself into believing I'd misheard, and then I sat there in the dark, waiting for the three dots to appear, waiting for someone in the world to tell me I wasn't crazy.
