For a moment, the camera showed only people disappearing inside, a stream of coats and bags flowing through the doorway of a house that was no longer mine and no longer theirs either, though they didn’t know that yet.
Then I heard Erica’s heels on the hardwood.
Click.
Click.
Click.
The sound echoed through the empty house, sharp in all that bare space.
A woman’s voice said, “Where is everything?”
Craig answered, “I don’t know.”
A few seconds later, Erica stormed back onto the porch and looked up and down the street, as if my furniture might be parked at the curb, as if the sofa and the dining table and twenty-five years of a life might be waiting out there in the cold for someone to claim them.
I took another sip of tea.
Ten minutes later, Craig sent me a video.
No message.
Just the video.
I pressed play.
Fifteen people stood inside the bare living room wearing winter coats, their breath almost visible in the chilly air of a house with the heat on but nothing left to hold the warmth.