Crash & Burn by Lisa Gardner Page A

the photo, and I set it down reflexively.
    â€œI always liked that picture of you,” Thomas says. He throws his keys in a basket on the table, trying to watch me while not appearing to be watching me.
    I know without asking that he took that photo and I’d been crying right beforehand. A raw, eyes-streaming, nose-running, throat-hiccupping jag that had concerned him so much he’d gotten out his camera in order to distract me.
    Sometimes I cry for no reason.
    See, I remember something about myself after all.
    I follow Thomas deeper into the home, coming face-to-face with the chocolate leather sofa, the glass coffee table. The kitchen is off the family room. Lighter, maple-wood cabinets, because I didn’t want the room to feel too dark. A backsplash of seafoam-green glass tiles because they reminded me of the ocean. A parlor table for two, wrought-iron base, butterfly mosaic inlay because I always yearned to fly.
    This is my room. As well as the sunroom directly off of it, withits crazy alternating lime-green and pink-magenta walls. Thomas had groaned the second he saw the colors. Don’t make me do it, he’d dramatized in mock horror. But it was my room, my space, and I could have it any way I wanted, so I’d gone with lime green and pink magenta.
    Just as long as it didn’t have a painted rosebush, climbing up the walls.
    â€œWork shed is out the back,” he says now, gesturing to the door off the sunroom. “Here is where you work. There is where I work.”
    â€œNot side by side?”
    â€œNot too often. I build; you paint. And between the two of us, the work gets done.”
    He leads me upstairs. No pictures on the wall and for some reason this surprises me, as if I’d been expecting them. The second floor has three bedrooms, including a master with its own bath. That room has a tray ceiling and a truly massive four-poster cherrywood bed.
    My first thought is there is no way I picked out that formal monstrosity. Thomas must have done it, because I already hate it.
    He doesn’t say anything, just completes the short, guided tour.
    â€œWhy such a big house for just the two of us?” I ask. “Do we entertain often, host many guests?”
    â€œWe liked this house, even though it was bigger than we needed. And, given that we do work together, sometimes it’s nice to have extra space.”
    I walk into the smaller of the two extra bedrooms. It features a lovely white-painted wrought-iron daybed, covered in a quilt of butter yellow.
    â€œI like this room.”
    He doesn’t say anything.
    I touch one corner of the quilt, finger it in my hand. It ishand-stitched, handcrafted. But not by me, I think instantly. The skill demonstrated here is well beyond my pay grade. And yet . . .
    I know who made this quilt. I miss her.
    And just for a moment, I feel it again. That sense of hollowness deep inside my chest. Yearning.
    â€œYou can sleep here if you want,” Thomas says quietly.
    â€œOkay.” I don’t even look at him. This room is mine; the master is his. He can tell me whatever he wants. I know better.
    Thomas wonders if I’m hungry. Actually, I am. We return downstairs, where he whips up two cheese omelets. I slice up a cantaloupe, admiring the fine edge on the knife’s blade. If this kitchen is my domain, clearly I take my equipment seriously.
    We sit at the parlor table and I realize I’m moving automatically, already following rhythms that must have developed over the past six months we’ve lived here. A party of two, banging around twenty-four hundred square feet, with cozy taste in furniture and surprisingly few pictures, knickknacks or personal decorations on the wall.
    I wonder if we finished unpacking all the moving boxes. Or if we’re simply people who prefer a very clean approach to home décor.
    After dinner, Thomas suggests we watch a movie. But I can tell he’s fading again, clearly dead on