And the smart lock on our apartment had no record of Cassian leaving. None. According to that system he was inside from six in the evening.
When I put the phone down I remembered two more things.
He had made me a hot milk before bed and stood there while I took my tablet for the insomnia, which he has never once done.
And when I woke up at 3:17 he was in grey pyjamas, and I would have sworn in a courtroom that he went to bed in the black ones.
He left for work at half eight.
I opened the lock app.
There are three fingerprints on that door.
Mine. Cassian's. And a third one with no name on it, added eight months ago.
It has come through my front door forty-seven times.
Almost always between one and three in the morning.
And on at least eleven of those nights, my husband was already in the apartment with me.
PART 2 — THE SEVENTIETH
Cassian and I met in 2018 and married in 2020.
He is a structural technician for a firm that does bridges and he is the single most predictable human being I have ever loved. Same coffee. Same route. Same three shirts.
His mother is Sabine Pellier and she is seventy-one and lives eleven miles away, and she is warm and social and there is one door in that woman that has never opened.
There was a brother.
I knew that in the abstract, the way you know a thing about somebody's family. Cassian had a twin. The twin died at four. There was an accident at a lake in 1997.
It came up perhaps four times in six years and every single time it was Cassian who closed it, not his mother.
Last spring was Sabine's seventieth. Thirty-five people at her house.
