In partnership with the Disquiet Literary Prize, Granta presents the winning entry for Fiction. 

It’s 11:03 now, so Betty Lane is late. I’m waiting in my rented Ford Escape – its AC sputtering through the early June heat – thinking of calling again or maybe abandoning my attempt to get inside Jane’s house. Hers is the last on this cul-de-sac, a street lined with mini mansions that mirror one another. I thought Jane would hate the suburbs, how one house blends into the next. But sitting here, I can understand the appeal. It’s nice to be alike, to be so similar you’re almost one.

Three weeks ago, I left the city. I’d planned to knock on Jane’s door, to try and reconnect, to repair what had been broken. But as I was pacing this street, working myself up to it, I heard a garage open, and there she was. I ducked behind the neighbors’ hedges and watched her walk down the driveway. Through the boxwood, I could tell her hair was several bottles blonder. She looked like she’d gained weight. Her eyebrows were thicker, darker, maybe laminated. She was wearing a pink sundress – she hates pink – and I realized as she picked up the newspaper how much time could pass in a year. It occurred to me that I no longer knew her.

So I booked myself a room at the Motel 6 and I waited. Until I learned more, until I understood why she’d left. Until this morning, when I found that a ‘for sale’ sign had, overnight, materialized on her lawn. The poster – a woman’s headshot, eyes blown up to ten times their natural size, lips big and red, wet with parabens – said ‘Betty Lane Real Estate’ in small script, followed by a telephone number.

When I called Betty about a tour, I used my best accent. I’d be a southern housewife after Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy, which I’d just watched at the motel. As I waited for Betty to check her schedule – acrylic nails click-clacking against computer keys – I considered my character like we’d done in theater school. Who was she? What did she want?

‘I can put you down for eleven this morning,’ Betty interrupted. ‘Your name again?’

‘Jessica,’ I said, committing. ‘Jessica Tandy.’

–

My phone reads 11:09. I thumb aimlessly through the pages of apps, forward then back, hovering above the mail icon before pressing it. One of my clients has messaged a third time about her new installation in Bushwick that’s been panned. Another is worried about the growing hate he’s received after copying a small creator on Etsy. Unread emails: 62. Outside of New York, I found it difficult to care. I watch the screen go black only for another ping to illuminate it. Doing PR for artists has to be a kind of masochism.

I wipe the sweat off my upper lip, chuck the phone into a cup holder. This was a mistake. What do I expect Jane’s house will reveal? Why she cut me off? Proof she hadn’t meant to? With a hand on the gear shift, now slick with moisture, I’m about to put the car into drive when a knock echoes off my passenger-side window. Peering inside, clad in an ill-fitting black pantsuit, is Betty Lane. Her eyes are smaller in person. She wears no lipstick, has no acrylic nails. What’s more, her belly is swollen to the size of a cantaloupe. I press the window switch, and we both watch the glass jerk awkwardly down.

‘Jessica?’

‘Yes?’ I say, sweeping the curls out of my eyes. ‘How’d you know it was me?’

‘Well . . .’ She glances around the empty street. ‘No one else here, ma’am.’

‘Silly me, sometimes I, uh, ain’t got the sense God gave a lemon!’

Betty coughs politely. ‘Shall we?’

I reluctantly release the wet gear shift and get out of the car, drying my hand on my pants. Following Betty up the drive, I stay several feet behind, stopping on the porch as she approaches Jane’s door. Flanked by two artificial ferns, she begins fishing around her large leather tote while I scan the road, tapping one of my sneakers, suddenly aware they don’t match my blazer and slacks, suddenly aware that they’ve just stepped from asphalt to wood, crossing the line between my space and Jane’s.

I shouldn’t worry. It’s a Monday and Jane is a teacher. Her husband, David, is a banker. She leaves the house at 6:45 a.m., and he leaves at dawn, no matter the season. Jane used to call this admirable, but I call it obsessive, maybe self-obsessed. Because, honestly, is driving in your climate-controlled Tesla to sit in a plush office of latte-delivering interns that hard? No, it’s not.

What is hard? Dealing with sickly, sticky five-year-olds who poop their pants for attention and guzzle Elmer’s glue like tequila. From what I’ve glimpsed over these three weeks, Jane gets to work before all the other teachers, parking in the farthest spot. In the classroom, she cleans each child’s desk with Lysol, knowing Crayola will soon replace Lemon Breeze. Then she writes a lesson plan on the board, eats two hard-boiled eggs, and sips matcha until her first child arrives.

Betty finds Jane and David’s key and sticks it in the lock, pushing open the heavy mahogany door. The cold air hits us instantly, clings to our skin. I’ve seen pictures of the house, but Zillow doesn’t do it justice: the foyer is massive with sparkling, black-and-white tiles, an ornate staircase that leads to a visible second floor, a crystal chandelier suspended above it all.

I try to appear like I’m considering the space and say, ‘It’ll be small for me, but maybe it’s got a good pool?’

‘No pool,’ Betty says, leading me deeper into the house. The hall seems to stretch forever, like that scene in The Shining. ‘But it has an open floor plan and this nice crown molding throughout. The foundations are from 1901 . . .’

If they don’t have a pool, David must workout at Equinox, but I’ve only seen him there twice – once two Saturdays prior and again last Wednesday after work. When she met him four years ago, Jane told me David would swim laps every day for hours. As we shared a carton of pad thai on our lumpy futon, she explained how he hated the feeling of being sweaty or sticky, of looking to the outside world as if he was exerting any effort. I told her this was a red flag, but she disagreed. She thought that he was ‘so smart’, the way he kept up appearances ‘so impressive’. While the other guys she’d dated couldn’t be bothered to match their socks, clean the pink rings growing in their toilet bowls.

‘What’s the price again?’ I ask Betty, already knowing.

She brings us into the kitchen, a sterile space with white walls and white marble countertops, everything stainless steel, faux aluminium brick flooring, the table and chairs two different shades of grey. ‘It’s listed at 1.5,’ she says, ‘but they’re open to offers. Only been here seven months.’ Then she points to the double dishwashers. ‘See those?’

I nod as if my third-floor walk-up – the one I shared with Jane – has one let alone two. ‘Huh, I’d expected higher. You see, my late husband, Richard –’ I let out a small sigh. ‘Forgive me. The life insurance policy he left was, let’s call it, extraordinarily fair.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Betty sticks out her lower lip, pouting. But it’s only for half a second, then she’s turning toward the sink, earnestly explaining about the ‘high-end’ garbage disposal, and now my fake, dead husband is really dead. She flicks on the disposal, and we listen to it consume whatever Jane and David had for dinner. Chicken, I think, probably dry. Jane isn’t a good cook. I cooked for us, starting from the day we met.

I’d moved to our dreary Detroit suburb for sixth grade and, after a month, still hadn’t made friends, which shouldn’t be surprising since I was a twelve-year-old girl with a buzz cut. In my last school, a military school, the boys copied their fathers, and no one minded when I copied the boys (even though I didn’t have a father and my mother, a Lieutenant Colonel, had bushy, brown hair). In Detroit, everyone asked if I had cancer. When I said no, they stayed far away.

My mother was rarely home, so if someone knocked on our door, I usually didn’t answer. But one day I did, and there was Jane, blonde hair in two braids, summer freckles dusting her nose and cheeks. Her left hand was in her pocket, her right stuck out for me to shake. ‘I’m your neighbor,’ she said. ‘Cool hair. Mind if I hang out here?’ But she was already walking past me.

I made us a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese, and we watched the newest episode of Hannah Montana. ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ hummed in the background as Jane scrutinized my head. ‘Are you sure you don’t have cancer?’

I rubbed my stubble. ‘Yep, pretty sure.’ A beat passed between us as I shifted on the leather couch. ‘Why’d you come over?’

She seemed unsure for a moment and chewed at her top lip. ‘My parents are fighting. They’ll get over it, but the screaming, it kind of hurts my ears.’

I nodded like I knew.

The next day, Jane returned; they were yelling again. She came three nights later, then two nights after that, and soon we devised a system so that I would have the Kraft and the DVR ready. Jane’s mother loved flowers, but her father was allergic, so they had fake plants around the house, mostly plastic tulips. One white tulip on a vase in the kitchen windowsill facing ours meant Jane was alone, everything was good. Yellow meant her parents were coexisting. Pink was DEFCON 1. When she left a pink tulip, I started boiling the water.

Jane never mentioned my cancer again. Instead, when a girl from class asked how my chemo was going, Jane gave her crooked bangs. When, in eighth grade, I was passed over for the lead in The Wizard of Oz, Jane had us TP the director’s house and then film our own version in which I was Dorothy, she the scarecrow, tin man, and lion. When no one asked me to junior prom, she turned down three proposals and bought us matching corsages. When, at eighteen, I slept alone several nights a week – Mom’s work increasingly demanding travel – Jane practically moved in. She said she never wanted me to feel lonely.

For seven years, she left tulips on her kitchen windowsill each night. For seven years, I was ready to receive ‘DEFCON Pink,’ as we came to call it. I was ready with macaroni, Disney, oblivion: a blank space to relieve the voices she was escaping from. Because in that empty house, Jane became my sound, and I became her silence.

–

The kitchen opens into the living room: an Ikea-style coffee table, a heavy, peach carpet, an off-white sofa covered in protective plastic wrap. There’s a vase of flowers on the table, but they’re lilies, not tulips, and they’re purple, which never meant anything. Scuffmarks litter the wood, and rings from cold drinks tattoo its edges despite a neat pile of coasters there in the center.

I scan the room, desperate for anything to indicate Jane misses me. I run my fingers along the sofa’s plastic; the cushions look like they’re being suffocated. Betty assures it’s only for tours and don’t worry there’s no critters here. ‘Take a seat,’ she says. ‘Kick your feet up.’

But when I try and sit, I’m repelled back. I squirm and the plastic crinkles. I put one foot on the table, then the other, getting comfortable, which makes Betty gasp a little and I realize, too late, that she wasn’t serious. ‘Maybe we should move to the bedrooms,’ she says. But it’s hard to notice or care because there’s a 75-inch flatscreen in front of me and not a painting in sight.

Jane first became passionate about art, specifically Renaissance art, during our freshman year at NYU. I was an actor, convinced I would make it to Broadway, devoting all my time to rehearsal. But the longer Jane spent in the art department, the less we were together. I asked her to volunteer on the crew, as an usher. She had no interest. She still came to every show, still cyberbullied any publication that gave me a bad review. By that point, I was used to capitulating to her. So I gave in: I double majored in art history.

After graduation, Jane got a job working HR at Christie’s, while I did small roles off-Broadway. She’d claim she wanted to get her master’s, to be a professor of art. Yet every year the deadlines came and went until, finally, I applied with her. I was accepted at Columbia, Fordham, Brooklyn College, and the New School. Jane got into Fordham. When I put down my deposit, she said she was just waiting for her next pay check.

But between pay checks, Jane met David at a dimly lit bar near our apartment. She liked to go there and drink Moscato and read, mostly Woolf, Plath, and Dickinson. Only depressing, dead women who’d been institutionalized, Jane said, or should have been. She thought it was romantic, sipping cheap white wine on a Tuesday, filling her brain with haunting, feminine worlds.

That night, as Jane told it, David sat on the wooden stool beside hers and cracked open a copy of Infinite Jest. She noted this and cleared her throat, slightly arched her back. When he turned, though, he stared into her eyes, not at her chest. After several drinks, she knew she’d met her husband; he was almost too handsome, too perfect.

Within six months, Jane and David were engaged. And then there was a wedding to plan, and our apartment became a flurry of sample invitations on heavy paper, stacks of wedding dress catalogs, doll-like squares of chocolate cake and red velvet cake and carrot cake. And suddenly the Renaissance was out, and bar napkins, flower arrangements, and thin, champagne-colored, paper straws were in. Graduate courses were too much work, Jane said, plus David made a lot of money. I went to Fordham alone.

‘What about our deal?’ I asked Jane as we bubble-wrapped kitchenware the week before her move.

I reminded her of the vow we exchanged in the girl’s third-floor bathroom during homecoming our senior year of high school. The DJ’s bass thumping through tiled walls, the putrid smell of puke mixing with hairspray like toxic sludge, me dabbing lines of mascara on her cheeks while she cursed Tommy Allen for kissing another girl on the dance floor. We swore never to trust men, never to get married. We swore we’d be each other’s family, forever.

‘We were just girls,’ Jane said. ‘We were just saying things.’

‘But what about me?’ I asked.

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll be alone.’

Jane picked up a rusted wine opener and considered it thoughtfully. ‘Have you tried Hinge?’

‘I’m serious. What’s going to happen to us?’

‘Seriously, you’re my best friend. Nothing’s going to happen to us.’

I remember feeling assured by her crooked smile. Like I was silly for thinking otherwise, like I was crazy for imagining she might slip away.

So tell me why it’s been a year since Jane and I last spoke. Tell me if I’m crazy.

–

Back in the foyer, Betty and I study the open walk-in closet. Jane and David’s coats hang limp in the murky space, like skins waiting to be inhabited. ‘There’s eight closets total,’ Betty says proudly, nodding at the sparsely filled rack. Then she closes the door and proceeds to the stairs, brushing past a skinny entryway console filled with takeout menus, junk mail, and two framed pictures: one of Jane and David in front of the London Eye, another at the top of Machu Picchu, their arms raised.

‘And how many bedrooms?’ I ask. The answer is four. I grip the staircase’s metal banister with one hand and lean back a little, testing its weight, feeling like Gene Kelly.

‘Four plus an office connected to the master,’ she says, kitten heels clapping on the stairs. ‘They meant to make it a nursery.’

‘Are they pregnant?’ I ask, swinging back and forth, staring at Jane’s sweaty face in front of the ancient Incan city. Her lululemon leggings and zip-up. I couldn’t even get her to run.

‘I think they’re trying,’ Betty says as she reaches the top landing. When she turns and finds I’m still there at the bottom, she gets this impatient or maybe concerned look on her face. It makes my stomach knot, the tension, the need to unravel it. Our height difference is funny, I think, like she’s Queen Elizabeth and I’m her peasant, and so I pretend to do the royal wave, cupping my palm and toggling it left then right, left then right.

Betty only clears her throat.

I drop my hand and take the stairs two at a time. When we’re facing each other, me huffing from the climb, I point at her stomach and have another go: ‘I see you tried too.’ At this, Betty’s face goes red, and she waddles off.

Two weeks after their honeymoon at the Ritz-Carlton Reserve in Dorado Beach, Jane told me she and David were ‘trying’, which meant she’d officially given up on Fordham, officially abandoned our pact. Still, I kept my mouth shut. I bought her birthing books, a basal body thermometer to track ovulation, unnaturally tiny hats in yellow and green. I sent her articles on diet and male fertility, lists of the leafy greens and legumes David should eat to give them a baby with a high IQ.

But it didn’t matter because Jane and David tried to no avail: no pink line, no smiley face on the pee-stained stick. They tried with the help of doctors, holistic nutritionists and, once, a hypnotist. They tried in their Brooklyn apartment, in a London hotel room, in a tree house at their third spa retreat, and in David’s Times Square office, watching as the New Year’s Eve ball dropped. They tried for six months, eight months, a year.

At the start, I called Jane every day. She picked up right after sometimes, still panting as she described the positions they’d tried in, what was scientifically better for the gamete to reach the oviduct and link up with an oocyte. I felt more connected to her than at any time in our adult lives, but especially in the months since she’d moved. I figured that this baby would be my bridge. She’d ask me to nanny. She’d ask me to be godmother. I’d become a part of rather than outside of the family she was growing.

Then, after several months, Jane stopped answering every day. She answered every other day. Once a week. Every two weeks. She was probably embarrassed, upset. So I texted too. I DM’d, Snapchatted, and Facebook messaged. I used LinkedIn once. No, twice.

After a particularly long stretch of silence, we met for lunch, Jane’s idea. She brought David, which wasn’t unexpected. I hadn’t seen her alone since the wedding. For twenty minutes, he talked about hedge ratios, derivative securities, and busted convertibles, which has nothing to do with cars, and I sipped my wine and smiled and nodded when Jane did.

When he eventually went to the bathroom, I leaned across the table. ‘You understand this stuff?’

‘No, but he gets so excited,’ Jane said, breaking her bread in two and mashing it against her olive oil-drenched plate. ‘I bought one of those For Dummies books.’ She popped the bread into her mouth and wiped her fingers on the tablecloth.

‘You aren’t bored?’

‘I think it’s sweet. It reminds me of you and those shows. All the jargon.’

I laughed uncomfortably, thought back on how she listened to me describe the merits of method acting, the differences in stage lighting, how I believe ‘break a leg’ is an insult.

‘The real reason for this lunch,’ she said, looking toward the bathroom, ‘is I wanted to tell you to cool it. On the texts? The calls? I know you’re excited about . . .’ She gripped her stomach. ‘Our trying, but I need some space, some time away.’

I concentrated on the oil coating her lips. I wanted to reach out and rub it off. Instead, I slid my hands under my butt. ‘Time away from me?’

‘Yes,’ she said, staring intently at the oil pool. ‘Yes.’

I limited myself to one call a week, to texting every two days. It was like a diet, a Jane diet. It was the newness of space, the extra air that I found most affecting. Without her, everything felt emptier, as if she’d vacuumed up the corners of my life. The reality was I didn’t have many friends: they were Jane’s friends. I didn’t have places I liked to go or things I liked to do. They were her places, her things.

Admittedly, I broke my diet often, calling and texting when I shouldn’t have. Because, sometimes, she did reply, with a word or two. But then, later, even these monosyllables dried up. I was sending text messages that never delivered, writing emails that bounced back, just to feel close to her. I kept up with her fertility journey online until I couldn’t find her profiles. I made new accounts to test if it was a problem with my phone, but she’d disappear again. I filed reports with Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook and never heard back.

After two years, I’d been through three Craigslist roommates while Jane and David were pregnant zero times. I tried to throw myself into work, but I felt my concentration melting away, my worries about gallery openings and exhibits becoming worries about Jane. What was she doing? People used to say I was precise, exact, obsessively committed. I was.

I mailed a lengthy letter to Jane and David’s address and, finally, got my response. It was a text that said a lot of things, some nicer than others, but mostly that Jane was cutting me off.

She said David might pursue legal action if I continued to contact them, to show up where I wasn’t invited. Her last line: please, stop.

–

Betty moves with her stomach pushed out, and it reminds me of a toddler learning to walk, bumbling around as if on stilts. I follow as she wobbles into the master bedroom: a king-size bed, two matching bedside tables, a second 75-inch mounted on the wall, a door, barely ajar, to a smaller room with a cream-colored rocking chair and several unopened boxes. Through the wilting cardboard handles, I see something fluffy and brown.

‘So,’ I say, picking up a thick book on, I assume, David’s side. ‘Do you know why they’re selling?’

Betty eyes me and laughs in clumsy breathes. ‘I, uh, promise it’s nothing wrong with the house.’ She enters the en suite bathroom, motioning for me to follow. ‘They’re moving to Iowa, I think.’ Everything is blinding white tiles and light wood. ‘Or maybe it’s Indiana? The husband’s got some big new job.’ Three digital panels manage at least four temperature gauges. Betty leans against one, her elbow pressed on the upwards arrow until the screen says 86 degrees and my feet begin to burn. ‘Nice guy, the husband. Now how about this rain shower?’

It was always about David. When Jane and I still talked, David was the reason we couldn’t hang out. David has a work event. David’s too tired. David thinks we should take it easy tonight. David had invaded our lives so completely he was like that alien who impregnates one of the crew, bursts out of the guy’s chest, and takes over the spaceship.

David had taken over our ship.

After that text, when Jane’s silence became prolonged, profound, inescapable, this idea about him solidified, convincing me to show up outside their sprawling, three-bedroom in Williamsburg. I remember the Ring camera leering above the bell, pressing that thick, black button, Jane opening the door in a fuchsia robe, blonde hair piled in a messy bun. Her makeup was done, but she looked bloated, heavy.

‘What are you doing here?’ She turned to search behind her shoulder.

‘I’m glad you’re alive,’ I replied, reaching for her cheek.

She pushed the hand away as David appeared. He was a tall, gangly man. Jane would say he was kind, intelligent, funny, but I couldn’t see it, the personality she claimed he had. He was always overly polite, always enunciated words. He liked Catan and pickleball. He believed in the efficacy of blue light glasses, thought crypto was the future and running was passé. Didn’t that just make him Elon Musk?

‘Nice to see you,’ he said stiffly, squeezing Jane’s arm. When he leaned down to whisper in her ear, I saw she became uncomfortable, shifting from foot to foot. It was in that moment I realized: David knew what I’d said about him. Now he was whispering in her ear that I was the problem, that I was the one who had to go. As Jane glanced between us, a yearning in her eyes, I clocked her pink robe again. Was this is a mayday, a new cipher for DEFCON Pink? I was almost positive she was asking for help.

David pulled back, grimacing as he looked me over, then went inside. When he was gone, I gathered my friend’s hands in mine. ‘You have to believe,’ I said, ‘nothing he says about me is true.’

Jane began crying, hysterical and snot-filled sobs. I wanted so badly to reach out to her, to hold her, but she said, ‘I need you to seek help, like real help. You’re not right, you know? I’ve been trying to say it nicely.’

My vision turned blurry. ‘You tried to say what nicely?’

‘That I can’t breathe.’ She inhaled dramatically, rubbed her cheeks. Then she glared at me and twisted her mouth into this hard, mean line I’d never seen before. ‘If you come back, I’ll call the cops. I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she repeated as she closed the door in my face. The reclaimed wood hit my nose.

I tried to do what Jane said, ‘seek help.’ I got a therapist – actually, a team of them. One for alternating days of the week because I was that serious. I told each therapist what happened, and they all came back with an alphabet soup of scientific diagnoses, but it really boiled down to one: stalking. I was, apparently, ‘stalking’ Jane. Two psychiatrists wrote prescriptions I didn’t fill, and the others asked me to talk, which I preferred. I talked about my childhood, my lack of family and friends, my failing PR business, my failed dreams. It didn’t matter. When they repeated that word, ‘stalking’, it didn’t click. Because you can’t stalk your best friend. You can’t stalk the person you lived with for ten years, the person who held you when your mom died, the person who woke you up because she was afraid to fall asleep alone, because the blaring ambulances and the honking horns reminded her of her parents’ raised voices.

Months later, when I ghosted the last therapist, I returned to Williamsburg. But Jane’s landlord said they’d moved. To the suburbs, he thought. I knew the office where David worked. And so, one day, I decided to rent the Ford Escape, to tail David’s Tesla up Broadway and onto the highway, across the GW Bridge, home to New Jersey.

I was going to wait and watch until I found something to prove that I wasn’t crazy, that Jane needed me.

–

As Betty points out the bathtub’s multiple jacuzzi settings, I think about what I’ll say to Jane when I bump into her at the grocery store – the one she visits twice a week – or the park where she goes jogging. I’ll tell her to come home, that she can sneak out like she used to. That he can’t keep us apart any longer. Maybe I’ll leave a Polaroid of us on her bedside table, a folded-up note in her La Mer night cream, just so she knows I’m close. I wonder if they have tulips in the backyard. I’ll put one on the kitchen windowsill. I’ll activate DEFCON Pink, remind her that we took care of one another, remind her that she’s living the life we vowed to avoid. Jane called these people sad, the ones who walk around eating, drinking, working, fucking on a schedule. But here she is, rising at six o’clock, driving to school, leaving school, going to the grocery store, buying corn flakes and sliced ham, driving home. No art or culture, no urban sounds or rural silence. The suburb exists somewhere in the middle, I think, like purgatory.

There’s only one deviation I’ve noticed in Jane’s routine. The last three Fridays, she and David have gone to a fertility center during lunch. It’s never been the same office, but Jane will always come out sniffling, and David will always hold her tightly, tenderly. If I use the binoculars I store in my Ford, I can see that he’ll shed a tear too, saying something to conjure a glimmer of hope in her eyes. They’ll embrace and he’ll whisper in her ear. She’ll shudder and fall deeper into his arms.

–

In the master bedroom, Betty flags another gaudy crystal chandelier, and I have to cover my mouth to keep from laughing. I can tell she’s looking at me funny when she says, ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s perfect. Thank you . . . for all the information.’

Her eye twitches, and there’s a beat of uneasy silence. So I smile, at her face and then at her stomach. ‘When are you due?’

‘Oh,’ she says and squints at her belly, ‘I’m not –’

Just then, there’s a dinging sound indicating the front door has opened. It paralyzes us, traps us like ants in glue. We listen to it ring, inspecting each other over the quilted sheets until finally Betty says, ‘I didn’t think anyone would be here.’ She shuffles eagerly to the doorframe and pops her head out. ‘We’re upstairs, down in a minute!’

‘They’re home?’ I feel a hand going to my chest.

The realtor surveys me again, smiles with one corner of her mouth. ‘Maybe they wanted to meet their prospective buyer?’

I nod. I try to as I follow her out of the room. But I’m more focused on how hard my heart is beating.

Betty starts down the stairs, holding her empty stomach with one hand and the banister with the other. I pause at the top, scanning for an open window. I can see Jane and David below hanging up their light jackets. Jane looks so beautiful and so sad, dressed in a pink wrap dress. She’s wiping tears and David’s rubbing her back, his fingers tangled in her hair.

‘We’ll try again,’ I hear him say, his voice echoing, reaching every crown-molded corner of the room. ‘We’ll try again.’

This isn’t right. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.

‘Hello there,’ Betty says as she reaches them, unable to read their private moment.

It’s not even Friday. It’s Monday.

They turn and face her, and me, just as I’ve descended the first step.

Jane stiffens. ‘Emma?’

David’s mouth hangs open.

Betty glances between the three of us, smile faltering. ‘This is, uh, Jessica Tandy,’ she says, gesturing up at me. ‘The woman I told you about, Jane.’

Jane’s eyes are wide. ‘Grab your phone,’ she whispers to David.

David’s hands are still enmeshed in her hair, like a marionettist fumbling with the strings.

Betty Lane is twirling her necklace, its metal chain cutting off her circulation in real time.

‘The police,’ Jane says, frowning at David, eyes breaking from mine. ‘Mention the restraining order.’

David isn’t moving, and it’s upsetting Jane. I want to make her laugh, so I say, ‘Tell them it’s DEFCON Pink.’ Then I lift my hand and give them the royal wave.

Image © Tu Trinh