Then Melissa laughed.
It was a sharp, ugly little laugh I recognized from childhood, the one she used when she believed she had already won. When she was thirteen and broke my birthday necklace, she had laughed like that before Mom told me not to be dramatic. When she borrowed my car at twenty-two and returned it with a cracked bumper, she laughed like that before Mom said insurance existed for a reason. When she announced her engagement at my promotion dinner, she laughed like that too, with one hand on her fiancé’s arm and the whole table turning toward her.
Now she stood on the porch of my home wearing my cardigan and gave me that same laugh.
“You really called the police on your own family,” she said.
“No,” I replied. “I called the police on people trespassing in my house.”
Her mother-in-law, a thin woman named Carol according to the label on one of the prescription bottles that had rolled out of her purse, pressed a hand to her chest. “We were invited.”
“Not by me.”
Melissa’s husband, Derek, emerged from the house then. He was a broad-shouldered man with a boyish face and the confused expression of someone who had finally realized he had been handed a bomb with a bow on it.
“Amanda,” he said carefully, “maybe we can talk this through.”
I looked at him. “Did you know this house was mine?”
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
