A few days later, a messenger rang the doorbell to the Melancon brownstone and didn’t seem to want to leave until Hallow opened the envelope in front of him. When she thanked the messenger for the notice, he cast a surly look and tipped his hat at her. After going back inside, Hallow reread the message, which consisted of a single line: We regret to inform you that Jillian Epelbaum has passed away. The Courier font was in black ink. There were no details as to what had happened, no requests for prayer, no charities listed on where to send money instead of buying flowers, no funeral contact information. Nothing. This wasn’t some courtesy; it was condemnation. Robert wanted her to know what she had done. Hallow’s intuition churned in the pit of her stomach like a windmill whirling in the thick of a storm. She peered out the front window and saw a police car, whose red and blue lights were flashing, parked alongside the sidewalk closest to their home.
She squinted because she knew the man in the car but failed to place him in a particular memory, until she recognized him as Officer Evans. He looked the same except for the increasing patches of gray in his beard and scalp. He tipped his cap at her and grinned, and she moved away from the door. But not before another bead of water dropped onto her head—this time in a new place—and she sensed it wasn’t just the brownstone that was on the verge of caving in. She was too.
21
Once Josephine heard the news from Maman that the Epelbaums would not be getting the caul, she was so enraged that she did not confront Hallow about her decision. Like Maman, she didn’t know if anything she could say or do would change Hallow’s mind. Rather than resign herself to living the rest of her life in the brownstone, since the science patent was off the table, Josephine dug in her heels. She occupied herself inside her bedroom, where she cut out images of home decor and interior design and pasted them onto a vision board, then scanned her entire wardrobe to see which outfits she’d like to keep for when she and Landon would finally leave Harlem. The longer she fantasized, the more she lost track of time, until one day, she realized that a month had passed. Landon hadn’t called or visited. There was not a single time during their decades-long relationship when he had gone more than a week without touching base. Josephine was reluctant to reach out first because she felt like she was the aggrieved party. He had inspired her dreams about a new life and was now MIA. But she was restless.
Josephine’s fantasies collapsed, and she paced around the room wondering when Landon would call. Then she felt embarrassed that their relationship had regressed so much. Flouncing downstairs to Maman to vent about her problems with Landon was now an outmoded habit of hers, because Maman was either too busy with crying on the window seat in the hallway or staring mindlessly at the four walls of her bedroom. Ultimately, Josephine put aside her pride and called. The redirection of the phone call to voicemail after only two rings was the final straw. She wound up yelling at him for avoiding her before she could take a breath.
In the middle of the night, the doorbell rang. Josephine awakened and sat upright in bed, confused at who could be coming at this hour. She was about to pull the blankets back over her head until the doorbell rang again, and then she tiptoed down the steps to check the peephole of the front door. She quickly unbolted all the locks and pulled Landon in by the collar. He was dressed in all black, and a hat too large for his head obscured the majority of his face. When he entered the foyer, he neither hugged nor kissed Josephine, despite her falling over to spoil him with affection. When Landon didn’t move to relieve himself of his coat or seductively follow her up the stairs as they had always done in the past, Josephine took her arms away from his neck and crouched down to search his eyes underneath the hat, only to find a large shadow.
“What’s going on? You’ve been gone all this time, and you can’t say hello.”
“Look, I can’t stay long.”
“You just got here, and you’re already talking about leaving.” Josephine pulled him closer to her body and wrapped her right leg around his waist. “Come on,” she purred in his ear. “Let’s go upstairs.”
He pushed her hands away and said, “Jo, stop. None of that tonight.”
Josephine turned to Landon’s left and right to check behind his body. “No suitcase. A part of me hoped you’d finally be coming so we can leave.”
“I’ve thought about leaving, but I don’t know if we can do that together.”
Josephine backed up and sat down on the penultimate step of the staircase. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Have you gotten any calls lately from Robert Epelbaum?”
“No. Why would I?”
He walked up to her and said, “I have tried to reach him since the day after you and Hallow went to the party, and he won’t return any of my calls. I kept calling and calling, but he won’t answer.”
“Beats me. I don’t know.”
“And you haven’t gotten any suspicious calls, right?”
“No. Why are you asking this?”
“Cars have been parked outside of my home. They’d be parked along the side of the street where I live,
