Chapter 3
The night she found the note, Rosa hadn't planned to search Eleanor's room. She'd planned, if she was honest with herself, to say goodbye — to sit in the chair by the window where she used to read to Eleanor during the bad flu two winters back, and let herself feel something before the funeral machinery swallowed her whole.
Instead she'd noticed the tea. And once she'd noticed the tea, she couldn't stop noticing things.
The prescription bottle in the bathroom cabinet, half its capsules gone, was for a medication Rosa didn't recognize — not Eleanor's regular heart medication, which she knew by sight from years of setting it out with breakfast, but something with a label she didn't understand and a pharmacy stamp from a clinic two towns over, nowhere near the one Eleanor and Gerald normally used. She photographed nothing — she had no phone with her, had left it charging in the kitchen — but she memorized the name as best she could, mouthing the syllables to herself until they stuck: *Somidorex.* She would look it up. She didn't know how yet, but she would.
The closet held Eleanor's coat, still smelling faintly of her rosewater perfume. Rosa pressed her face into it for a moment, and that was when her hand, reaching for balance against the nightstand, brushed the underside of the mattress and felt the edge of folded paper.
She'd almost put it back unread. Some things weren't hers to know. But Eleanor's handwriting looking up at her — small, careful, the same hand that wrote grocery lists and thank-you notes — made it impossible to look away.
*Don't trust Simon. Don't sign.*
No date beyond a small "Tues" scrawled in the corner. Tuesday. The day before she died.
Rosa sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after that, the note in her lap, running through the small collection of facts she now possessed like beads on a string that didn't yet form a shape: a strange medication with no history in this house. A note warning against the family doctor. A cold cup of tea, calmly set down. A second insurance policy from March that Gerald had specifically instructed someone to locate.
She thought about going to the police. She got as far as picking up the kitchen phone before Gerald's voice, unexpected, came from the doorway.
"Working late?"
She'd nearly dropped the receiver. He stood there in his shirtsleeves, tie loosened, a glass of scotch in one hand, watching her with an expression that gave away nothing.
"Just checking the phone still works," she said. "For emergencies."
"There won't be any more emergencies in this house, Rosa." He'd said it gently, almost kindly, and set his glass down on the counter with a small, precise click. "Eleanor's resting comfortably. Dr. Fenwick's got everything under control. You should get some sleep — big day tomorrow, unfortunately."
May you like
He hadn't mentioned the phone again. He hadn't needed to. She understood, standing in that kitchen with the dial tone humming faintly in her ear, exactly how carefully she was being watched, and exactly how little room she had to move.
She put the note in her uniform pocket instead of the trash, because some part of her — the part that had learned, over six years, to trust her own instincts even when nobody else would — refused to let it disappear along with everything else in that house that had gone quiet too fast.
