She’d swatted his arm!
I yanked the sheet one more time and lifted the corner of the mattress to free the elastic.
Something shifted underneath.
Not fell. Shifted, like a small, heavy thing that had been carefully placed and was now sliding an inch to the left because I’d tilted its world.
I froze.
Downstairs, the coffee grinder started, the familiar rattle of our normal Saturday morning. The sound of a marriage that had spent yesterday shouting, “We did it, they’re gone!” like teenagers who’d survived a chaperone.
Something shifted underneath.
I lowered the mattress onto my knee.
“Okay,” I whispered to myself. “It’s probably a charger. Or a lost plastic container with something in it. Eleanor or Harold lost it, and they were too polite to mention it.”
My hand hovered in the air over the lifted edge.
