Chapter 3 - The Portrait Wall
I didn't go back to the bathroom mirror. I knew what it would show me and I didn't want to stand there barefoot on that cold marble and stare at it until I started shaking. I walked the hallway to my bedroom instead, my robe tied tight at my waist, the silk catching on my legs with every step. The house was too quiet for a wedding morning. No music. No voices downstairs yet. Just the low hum of the air and the soft sound of my own feet on the floor.
My name is Diane Miller. I was Michael's mother. That morning I was something else too, something I hadn't decided how to carry yet.
The bedroom was dim compared to the bathroom. I'd left only one lamp on by the chair, and the daylight coming around the edge of the curtains fell in a thin line across the carpet. It didn't reach the far wall. The portrait hung there like it always had.
It was large and dark, a heavy oil painting in an ornate gold frame, the kind of thing Richard had picked because it made the room look established. A field at dusk, almost black in places. I'd walked past it ten thousand times without really seeing it. That morning I saw nothing else.
I stood in front of it and listened. The hall was empty. Somewhere downstairs a door clicked, faint. Caterers, probably, coming in through the kitchen. I waited until that sound faded.
My scalp itched under the air. I tried not to touch it. Every time my fingers got close I remembered the bathroom light on the red skin and the stubble, and my stomach tightened again. She shaved my head. I hadn't said it out loud since the bathroom, but the words were still in my mouth, sour and steady.
Sabrina. Today, she marries my son.
I reached up with both hands and took hold of the frame.
It was heavier than I remembered. The bottom edge swung toward me first, then I had to slide the whole thing to the side on its wire, careful not to scrape the wall. My arms ached from holding it out. I was sixty-eight years old and barefoot in a nightgown, wrestling with a painting while my head burned. For a second I almost laughed at how wrong the picture would look to anyone else. Then the painting moved clear and I stopped.
The safe sat flush in the wall behind it.
Dark blue-gray steel, the silver keypad dull in the low light, the small dial below it. I'd only opened it a few times a year. Taxes. Deeds. Richard's watch after he passed. And now the envelope. The sight of the keypad steadied me in a way I didn't like. Numbers didn't lie. People did.
I lowered the painting, leaning it carefully against the wall beside the dresser, face turned inward so the wire wouldn't scratch the plaster. My breathing was louder than I wanted. I stood there looking at the closed safe and I didn't reach for it yet.
But first.
I thought it, I didn't say it. I needed a minute before my hands touched that code. Once I looked at the envelope, it would be real in a different way. Not just a wedding gift I'd planned for months. A decision.
I turned and crossed back to the bedroom door. It was still ajar an inch, the way I'd left it. I could see a slice of hallway, empty and bright. I pulled the door shut until the latch caught, then turned the little lock. The click sounded too loud in the quiet room. I stood with my hand on the knob for a moment, listening for footsteps, for Michael's voice, for Sabrina's. Nothing.
When I turned around, the room felt smaller. The open space where the portrait had hung looked wrong, a pale rectangle of untouched paint around the dark cut of the safe. The lamp threw a warm pool over the chair and the foot of the bed, but the wall stayed in shadow.
May you like
I walked back and stopped a foot from the safe. Close enough to see the faint smudge on the keypad from the last time I'd touched it. Close enough to see my own blurred reflection in the dial. Bald. Pale. My robe closed to the throat.
I didn't enter the code. Not yet. I folded my arms tight across my chest and forced myself to stand there and look at the closed door of it, and to admit what I was actually about to do.
