The apple pie was still warm in my hands when I stepped through Michael’s front door, the glass dish fogging slightly at the edges. I’d baked it that afternoon the way I always did—Granny Smith apples with just enough cinnamon, a lattice crust that Robert used to say looked like something from a magazine even though my hands always shook when I wove the strips together. Two years after his death, I still baked as if he might walk into the kitchen and cut himself a slice before it cooled, still measured the nutmeg the way he liked it, still left the edges a little darker because he always ate those pieces first.
“Mom, you made it,” Michael said, taking the dish from me with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
There was something tight in his expression, something rehearsed in the way he kissed my cheek. I told myself it was stress from work, that thirty-four-year-old men with demanding jobs and four-year-old daughters were allowed to look tired on a Friday evening.
“Of course I made it,” I said, smoothing down my navy dress. “You invited me to dinner.
I’m not going to show up empty-handed.”
Vanessa appeared from the kitchen in pressed slacks and a cream sweater that probably cost more than my monthly utility bill.
Everything about my daughter-in-law was polished—her highlighted hair, her manicured nails, the way she moved through rooms like she was being filmed for a lifestyle blog. She smiled at me with her perfect white teeth, but her eyes had that same tightness Michael’s did. “Brittney, you shouldn’t have,” she said, taking the pie.
“We already have dessert.”
Something in her tone made my stomach flutter uncomfortably.
Not quite dismissive, but not quite welcoming either. Like I’d brought something to a party where the menu had already been finalized without me.
The house smelled like roast chicken and rosemary, warm and inviting in the way that expensive candles try to replicate but never quite achieve. Classical music drifted from a speaker somewhere, something with strings that I didn’t recognize.
Michael and Vanessa’s home always felt like a showroom to me—everything coordinated, nothing out of place, the kind of house where you worried about leaving fingerprints on the stainless steel appliances.
“Where’s Emma?” I asked, looking past them for my granddaughter’s wild curls and gap-toothed grin. “Sleepover at Madison’s house,” Vanessa said quickly. “We thought it would be nice to just have the adults tonight.
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