The city passed outside the tinted windows in gray shapes and blurred lights. Morning rain slid down the glass in crooked lines, turning the streets of Buckhead into something soft and colorless. Atlanta had always looked different from the back seat of Terrence’s car. When he was alive, he would reach for my hand at every red light. He would point out buildings his father used to brag about owning, restaurants where his mother had corrected my posture, corners where he had kissed me when no one was watching. Without him beside me, every familiar place looked like it belonged to someone else.

Mr. Ellis kept both hands on the wheel. He was an older man with a narrow face, silver hair, and the kind of quiet dignity that made silence feel respectful instead of empty. He had driven Terrence since Terrence was twenty-two years old and still trying to prove he was more than Howard Washington’s son. He had driven us home from our courthouse wedding when Beverly refused to attend the reception. He had driven Terrence to the hospital the night the headaches became something worse.

Now he was driving me away from the house where my husband’s family had just tossed my marriage into the mud.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Washington,” he finally said.

His voice cracked on my name.

I looked up from the album in my lap. Mud had dried along the edges of the white leather cover. My thumb kept rubbing the same spot, even though all I was doing was smearing the stain deeper.

“For what?” I asked.

“For not stepping in.”

I turned toward the window again.

“You work for the family.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I worked for Mr. Terrence.”

That was when the tears came back. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just one hot line down my cheek, then another. I had cried so much at the funeral that I thought grief had wrung me dry, but loss is cruel that way. It waits until someone says the right name with the right amount of love in it, and suddenly your body remembers there is still more pain to give.

Mr. Ellis reached into the console and handed back a clean handkerchief without looking at me. I took it and pressed it to my mouth.

“Where would you like to go?” he asked.

The question should have been simple. A hotel. A friend’s place. Anywhere but back there. But I had spent three years living inside Terrence’s world, and for the last nine months, since his diagnosis, I had barely thought beyond the next appointment, the next treatment, the next morning when I would wake up and check whether he was still breathing beside me.

I had no apartment anymore. No mother waiting with a spare room. My mother died when I was nineteen. My father had disappeared long before that. I had a few friends from nursing school, women who would have opened their couches to me in a second, but I could already hear Beverly’s voice calling them charity. I would rather sleep in the car than give her that satisfaction, even if she never knew.

Before I could answer, Mr. Ellis said, “Mr. Terrence left instructions.”

My hand froze over the album.

“What instructions?”

“He told me if anything happened, and if they made you leave the house before Mr. Kline contacted you, I was to take you to the Ashford.”

The Ashford.

Not the hotel. The residence.

A private luxury building on Peachtree Street where Terrence kept a penthouse I had only visited once. I thought it belonged to the company. He had told me it was for “late nights and bad storms,” but we never used it. Beverly hated downtown traffic, and Howard considered condos something businessmen bought for mistresses. Terrence had laughed when he said that, but his eyes had gone distant, the way they did whenever his family made him feel older than he was.

“Mr. Kline?” I asked, though I already knew the name. Samuel Kline had been Terrence’s personal attorney, a calm man with round glasses and a voice so even it made bad news sound organized.

“He called me this morning,” Mr. Ellis said. “Before the funeral flowers were even cleared from the church. He said Mrs. Beverly might move fast.”

I let out something between a laugh and a sob.

“She did.”

“Yes, ma’am.”