“That’s okay. Just stop now.”
Another officer came. Then a detective. Then two evidence technicians in gloves who began photographing everything while you sat on the edge of a dining chair in your kitchen, wrapped in a blanket though the house was warm. You kept answering the same questions. How long had the smell been there? When did your husband leave? Had you ever heard the name Elena Morales? Did you know whether he had been married before?
“No,” you said each time. “No. No. No.”
The detective, a woman in her fifties with tired eyes and a calm voice, took the marriage certificate from an evidence bag and asked, “You married Miguel Alvarez in 2018?”
“Yes.”
“And to your knowledge, he was legally free to marry?”
“Yes.”
She nodded once. Not skeptical. Just filing facts into the place where facts wait to become dangerous.
They took the phone. The letters. The purse. The clothes. The whole mattress too. When they rolled it through your hallway and out the front door, the raw rectangle left on the floor looked obscene, like a wound you had been sleeping above.
