The Hollow Choir — Chapter 3

They left the house that night, and for eleven months, nothing happened at all — no phone calls, no letters, nothing but the ordinary quiet of a life rebuilt somewhere else.

Then the moving boxes arrived from the estate sale, the ones neither of them remembered ordering, and inside the first box, wrapped carefully in tissue paper as though someone had packed it with love, was a single small handprint pressed into dried clay.

Elena did not open the second box.