Free Home Improvement: Undead Edition by Charlaine Harris

tear them apart. Having successfully overcome her Polish and his Irish parents’ objections to their match had only given her more confidence.
    She was less innocent now.
    Much, much less innocent.
    Parking in that old spot had been habit, but it sat in her belly like a meal too cold. This was a bad idea. She knew it, but she couldn’t give it up without trying to mend what she had . . . lost was the wrong word. Destroyed might have been a more apt one.
    She rubbed her cold arms with colder hands, then turned off the motor. Without its warm hum, it was very quiet in the car.
    She got out at last, locked the doors with the key fob, and left her car in the parking place that probably belonged to someone else now. Blinking back the aimless raindrops, she tromped through the slush from what must have been last week’s snow on the sidewalk.
    Only then did she look at the gray stone apartment building ahead. Did they still call it an apartment building when all of the apartments were being sold as condominiums?
    It wasn’t a particularly large building, three floors, six apartments, surrounded by a small front parklike area that had always managed to insert a little color in the summer without requiring maintenance or inviting anyone to linger. This evening, with winter still reigning despite the rain that fell instead of snow, there was no color to be had.
    The cut granite edges of the steps were familiar and alien at the same time, worn in a way they hadn’t been when this had been their home—and that strangeness hurt.
    Next to the door, blown into the corner of the building, lay a little Valentine’s Day card with a heart on it. The ink had run, fading out the BE MINE to a grayish semidecipherable mush. Only the name Jack scribed in black crayon was still clear. It was both irony and a sign, she thought, but she didn’t know if a child’s wet card was a good portent or not.
    She looked up to the topmost windows with longing eyes and murmured, “Be mine, Jack?”
    She rang the bell on the side of the door, a new plastic button surrounded by stainless steel, and a buzz released the door lock. The real estate agent must have beaten her here.
    She wiped her tennis shoes off on the mat in front of the door and stepped into a small foyer. At first glance, she thought the room hadn’t changed at all. Then she realized that the names written in Sharpie below the numbers on the box were different from the names she had known, and the wooden handrail next to the stairs had been replaced with the same polished steel as the doorbell.
    “Our place, Elyna, just think of it!” Jack’s voice rang in sudden memory, full of eagerness and life.
    The wooden handrail had had a notch in it from when they’d hit it, she and Jack, with the sharp edge of her metal typist desk, carrying it up to their new home. She hadn’t realized she had been looking forward to seeing that stupid notch until it wasn’t there.
    She looked down and saw that the new handrail was dented a little, too. She knew better than to do something like that; she had better control. But that notch had been a memory of laughter and . . . poor Jack had hated that desk, its industrial ugliness an affront to his artistic eye. Still, he’d helped her carry it all the way up the stairs to their third-floor apartment.
    She’d paid him back, on top of the desk wearing (at least at first) a cream-colored lace teddy her mother had given her in a small, tastefully wrapped package with instructions to open it in private. Jack hadn’t minded the desk so much after that.
    And those kinds of thoughts weren’t going to help Elyna tonight.
    She continued up the stairs, trailing her hand over the new metal handrail, hard-won control keeping her hands open and light as they skimmed over the cold surface. On the third floor the real estate agent awaited her in a peacoat with damp shoulders. He had a closed rain-dampened umbrella in one hand.
    “Ms. Gray,” he said, taking a step