Chapter 1 — Goodbye, Sewing Room
For eight months, the door to our spare room had stayed shut, and on the morning it finally swung open for good, the first thing I noticed was that the air inside had gone quiet.
The room smelled like nothing in particular, which after eight months felt like its own small miracle.
For most of a year it had carried the layered scents of my father-in-law Wallace’s cedar aftershave, my mother-in-law Bernadette’s rosewater hand cream, and the faint mustiness of two people who never quite got around to opening the window. That morning, all of it had gone with them, packed into the trunk of their sedan and driven off down the street the evening before, and what was left behind was the crisp, ordinary chill of early October drifting through the window I’d thrown open the second their taillights disappeared.
There was one exception, though. One thin ribbon of scent still clinging to the corner near the closet that I could not place no matter how hard I tried.
It was warm and faintly sweet, almost caramelized, the kind of smell that drifts out of a candy shop on a cold afternoon before you’ve even spotted the storefront.
I stood in the doorway and inhaled it twice, frowning, then decided it wasn’t worth chasing down, because the light was spilling gold across the bare mattress and the whole room belonged to me again, and I refused to spend my first free Saturday morning in almost a year playing detective over a smell.
“Goodbye, sewing room,” I said to the empty walls, hands on my hips, grinning at all that reclaimed square footage. “Hello, actual sewing room, the way it was always supposed to be.”
FULL STORY on the next page.