Your jaw tightens.
Then she goes back inside.
You wait another three minutes before telling the driver, “Stay here.”
You slip out of the SUV and move quietly toward the narrow side gate built into the service wall. The code hasn’t changed in years. You enter it from memory, the latch clicks, and you step into the landscaped strip between the hedge and the kitchen wing of the house. The fountain at the front is too far away to hear from here. In the back garden, all you can hear is the faint hum of the filtration system and a distant murmur of music.
Music.
You follow the sound to the partially open kitchen window.
At first, what you hear makes no sense.
Not negligence.
Not television.
Not the clatter of a woman slacking off while your mother sits unattended in another room.
