Reggie finally stepped in. Scout came with him, circling once, nose working, unsettled by the wrong energy in a familiar room. The door shut behind them with a soft click that sounded too final for wood and hinges.
Nobody moved for a long moment. The hallway smelled like the lemon cleaner Reggie used at work and the vanilla candle Sondra liked and, underneath both, a faint trace of someone else's soap.
"You should go," Sondra said to Franklin, quieter now. "Please."
Franklin set the glass on the console table. His hands were steady. Reggie hated that. He wanted the other man to shake, to look like a thief. Instead Franklin looked like a person who had been invited and was now being uninvited, and the dignity of that was almost worse.
"I'm sorry," Franklin said, and he said it to Reggie, not to her. "I told myself stories about what this was. They were convenient. They weren't true enough."
"Don't speech me in my hallway," Reggie said.
Franklin nodded again. He took his jacket from the back of a dining chair—how long had that jacket been hanging there like it belonged?—and walked toward the front door. Scout growled low, then stopped when Reggie murmured his name. Franklin paused with his hand on the knob.
"For what it's worth," he said, "she talked about you like you mattered. That doesn't fix anything. I know."
Then he left. The porch light caught him for a second on the steps, tall and ordinary, and then he was just a man walking toward the street where, presumably, he had parked far enough away that Evelyn Stokes would not see him twice in one day.
The door closed. The house became three living things and a lot of silence.
Reggie's pulse was loud in his ears. He had imagined, in the half minute between Evelyn's question and this doorway, a dozen versions of rage. In none of them had the other man simply apologized and left with a jacket. The lack of a fight left Reggie holding a violence that had nowhere to go, and the holding was its own kind of exhaustion.
Scout circled the living room twice, sniffing the couch cushions, the rug, the spot near the dining chair where Franklin's jacket had hung. The dog's body was a meter for wrongness. When Scout finally returned to Reggie's side and sat, it felt like a verdict delivered without words: something that did not belong here had been here, and the air still knew it.
***
Sondra sat down hard on the edge of the couch. Reggie stayed standing. Scout paced between them, then settled by Reggie's feet with a sigh that sounded almost human.
"How long," Reggie said.
"Seven months." Her voice was small. "Not—not every week. Not at first."
"Seven months."