Too perfect, too empty, too final. He walked deeper into the living room, his footsteps echoing with a hollowess that hadn’t been there before. Madison’s favorite mug, the chipped white one she refused to throw away, wasn’t on the coffee table. The throw blanket sheet she always curled under during cold Manhattan nights, was gone.
Even her small collection of design books, the ones she used for her interior architecture projects, had vanished from the shelf. Logan’s pulses hammered. Madison never left things unfinished, and she never left without telling him where she was going, unless she’d stopped feeling like she owed him anything.
He moved toward the hallway, the hardwood floor cold beneath his shoes. The bedroom door was slightly open, as if she didn’t bother to close it behind her. Or maybe she wanted him to see the truth of what she’d taken and what she’d left behind. He pushed the door open. The room looked stripped, like someone had moved out overnight. The closet door hung open, revealing empty hangers and a few scattered dresses she no longer wore.
The drawer where she kept her soft maternity shirts was half open. every neatly folded piece missing. But the silence was what pierced him, heavy, accusing, it made the walls feel too close, the air too thin. Near the window, he noticed a detail that turned his stomach. Her prenatal appointment schedule, usually pinned on a corkboard, lay torn in half on the floor, and the sonogram image, the tiny outline of their child, had been taken. He swallowed hard.
That picture was everything to her. She stared at it every night before bed,whispering promises she thought he couldn’t hear. But he had heard. He just never cared enough to answer. He stepped back, suddenly dizzy, gripping the edge of the dresser. Where would she go? Who would she call? She had no family in New York, no close friends.
