Her briefcase waited near the front door. Inside were research notes and marked copies of arguments scheduled for the afternoon at the federal courthouse, where the appellate panel was sitting that week. She had read the record twice the evening before and planned to go over several disputed passages once more after breakfast. For now, she had twenty minutes to herself, which seemed like a modest and entirely reasonable thing to want.
Her husband, James Laurent, had left before six. He was a cardiothoracic surgeon at a Portland hospital and had a morning operating schedule that left little room for delays. He had kissed her forehead as she stood half asleep near the coffee maker and promised to send a message between cases. She had told him not to hurry on her account, then reminded him to eat something that wasn't vending-machine crackers.
Their marriage was not a perfect arrangement of uninterrupted happiness. They both worked difficult jobs, both carried tension home, and sometimes communicated through messages left on the kitchen counter because their schedules crossed only at night. But they knew where the other person was most vulnerable. James understood that Simone sometimes needed silence after hearing terrible stories in court, and Simone knew that his habit of checking the doors before bed had less to do with fear than with the desire to keep the people he loved safe.
The house had been their compromise between their busy lives and the quieter life they wanted. It was a two-story pale yellow Craftsman with white trim, a wraparound porch, and a narrow front yard that looked larger because Simone had planted it carefully. A rose garden followed the walkway, red geraniums flanked the steps, and a small bench sat beneath a maple tree. They had saved for it, argued gently over the mortgage, and made the last decision together at the kitchen table with a calculator between them.
They had lived in Laurelhurst for five years. Most mornings, a neighbor named Eleanor Henderson greeted Simone from the adjoining porch. Eleanor was seventy-eight, white-haired, opinionated about soil and weather, and almost offensively generous with cuttings from her garden. She had begun as the woman who knocked one Sunday to complain, politely, that Simone was watering too much. By the following month they were drinking tea together every weekend.
Eleanor knew what Simone did for a living, although she seldom used her title. She knew James worked at the hospital, that the couple had taken a trip to Hawaii the previous month, and that Simone sometimes walked around her yard in the evening with a legal pad because standing among plants helped her think. To Eleanor, none of these details made Simone a special category of neighbor. They made her a neighbor, which was enough.
"Morning, Simone," Eleanor called through the open space above the low fence. She had a watering can in one hand and wore a faded floral dress under a light cardigan. "Those roses are trying to embarrass mine again."