For three days, the house was quiet in the way a held breath is quiet. Damon carried his single key and said little. Colette, without a copy of her own, sulked through the shared spaces, testing doors she now found locked. I told myself the closing of his fingers around that key had meant something. Then, on the fourth morning, I checked the camera footage in the hallway out of habit, the documentation I had installed for exactly this reason. What I saw on the screen made my stomach drop.

At 2:14 in the morning, while I slept, Damon had walked to the front door in his socks, quietly unlocked it, and handed his key to his mother waiting on the porch. The camera caught everything, the exchange, her satisfied nod, the way he glanced back toward our bedroom to make sure I had not woken. By sunrise, the key was back on his ring as though nothing had happened. He had not chosen me. He had chosen to deceive me, and to hand my own home back to the woman who had thrown metal at my face. I did not confront him yet. Instead, I saved the footage, and I made one phone call.