“
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.
That first night alone after the discovery, you did not stay in the house.
You packed a duffel, drove to a hotel near the airport, and sat fully dressed on top of the comforter until dawn. Every sound in the
