At sixty-two, I had finally reached the age where I no longer wanted excitement arriving at my front door.
I had already had enough of it.
My husband had died six years earlier. My daughter had moved to another part of Bellmere with her own family. I had spent more than three decades working in a public elementary school, first as a secretary and later managing the front office, which meant I had endured angry parents, sick children, missing permission slips, broken copy machines, emergency drills, budget cuts, and principals who believed every crisis could be solved by scheduling a meeting.
Retirement was supposed to be quieter.
And mostly, it was.
I lived in the same little house on Cedarbrook Lane where my husband and I had spent twenty-eight years arguing about paint colors, planting tomatoes, replacing gutters, and telling ourselves we would eventually renovate the kitchen.
We never did.
After he died, I kept everything mostly as it had been.
His old workbench stayed in the garage.
His dented red toolbox remained beneath it.
There was a ceramic garden fox near the hydrangeas that he bought me at a roadside market because I had once complained that everyone on Cedarbrook Lane owned a garden gnome.
“You are not everyone,” he had said.
So I got a fox.
It had one crooked ear and an expression that looked permanently offended.
I loved it.
My neighbor, Vanessa Cole, moved into the rental house next door two years after my husband died.
She was somewhere in her mid-thirties, stylish, energetic, and always moving as though she were late for something important.
She had two children, an electric SUV, a delivery package on her porch almost every day, and absolutely no understanding of boundaries.
At first, I liked her.
