It felt like the world stopped breathing with her.
Seraphine stood in the doorway, fingers trembling around the handle of the bat. The house smelled of dust and betrayal - the scent of years she'd wasted pretending things were fine. It first started with the distraction. Glancing repeatedly at the phone, turning it upside down and smiling widely. Like I told him we just won a free meal at a boogie restaurant. My smile would falter and so does the first seedling of doubt.
We were married for 3 years, so fresh and so young as well. We met at a movie theatre, accidentally swapping seats. It was love at first sight and the scent of popcorn and old velvet hanging in the orchestra tuned their instruments. He'd taken the seat beside her by chance, their hands brushing when they both reached for the playbill — a spark so sudden it felt scripted. By intermission, they were laughing like old friends; by the final act, she couldn't imagine not knowing him. Their whirlwind romance became a quiet marriage built on late-night talks and shared coffee cups, but as the years softened into routine, small cracks began to appear. A lingering text he wouldn't explain, late meetings that stretched past midnight, and the faint trace of perfume she didn't own — each whisper of doubt settled heavier in her chest, turning love's once-golden glow into something colder, sharper, and uncertain.
She couldn't look at him anymore. She couldn't. There was no point. Outside, the moon sat low over the garden, silvering the edges of the spade leaning against the fence. She walked barefoot into the cold, the ground still damp from last night's rain. Every step was heavy with finality, but her mind was strangely quiet — like she'd finally found peace in the noise she'd silenced. She started digging.
The soil gave easily, soft and dark, rich with years of care. She'd always loved this part of the yard — the spot that caught the morning light, where she'd once dreamed of growing sunflowers tall enough to see from the kitchen window. Now, it would grow something else first. Something she'd never speak of again. She struck the shovel back in the ground and wiped the seat off her brow. Walking back into the house, she moved the body closer to the end of the carpet. Seraphine moved all the furniture off the carpet, including the wooden coffee table she got as a wedding present. With all the strength she could muster, she rolled him with the carpet and made him a human burrito. She briskly walked into the kitchen and got duct tape and secured the bottom of his feet and top of his head.
Dragging the body wasn't an easy feat. This man weighed 98kg, he could have lost the weight before he died. Oh well. At least he wasn't commenting about her weight like he did last week at dinner with his work friends. She dragged him into the yard and pushed him with such a great force that he was no longer in a linear shape. Like a parabellum of sorts. She shrugged it off.
By the time she was done, her palms burned and her arms ached. Dawn was already brushing the horizon when she reached for the compost bags stacked by the shed. She tore them open and poured them over the earth, mixing them in with the soil — layer by layer, until there was no trace left of what had happened beneath. When it was over, she pressed her hands against the ground and exhaled. The air smelled of earth and rain, not of him
Seraphine fetched a handful of sunflower seeds from the porch — the ones he'd never let her plant because they "took up too much space." She knelt down and pressed them gently into the soil. One by one. Like small promises.
"Grow tall," she whispered. "Grow brighter than he ever was."
When she finally stood, the sun was rising — streaks of gold and pink washing over her face. For the first time in years, she didn't feel small.
She wiped the dirt from her hands and went inside to shower. By summer, no one would remember the man who used to live here. Only the sunflowers.
— —
She moved through the day as if moving through someone else's life. The kettle whistled; dishes were washed and stacked; she answered the telephone in the practiced cadence of a woman who wanted to sound ordinary. In the mirror, her face looked like a photograph: composed, measured, eyes carefully neutral. Behind that polish, something old and brittle had been replaced by something the world had not named.
Two days later she called it in.
Her voice on the police line was small, deliberate—fragile enough to avoid suspicion, steady enough to be believed. "He's not home," she said. "He didn't take his car. He's not with family. I can't reach him." It was the sort of report people made when they were frightened for a loved one, and the sound of her own concern felt like a costume she had put on in the dark. I was already wearing my little black dress that one would wear to a funeral. The operator's questions were routine, the officer's tone sympathetic. She furnished details, the kind that begged follow-up but never landed on the thing she wouldn't speak aloud.
Neighbors spilled forward with condolences and theories. Someone suggested he had run off with a younger woman; another insisted he had a gambling problem and pins would fall that way. They coaxed answers from each other, hands on teacups, eyes darting toward her as if she were a drama they had not bought a ticket to. Seraphine listened, nodded, let them braid their own narratives around the empty space on his side of the couch. It was easier for them when they could tell a story instead of seeing the silence.
At the station, the officer asked the practical questions—last seen, recent arguments, financial troubles—things that fit into boxes on a form. Seraphine gave them what she could: tone, inflection, carefully selected memories that painted a marriage that had been ordinary and stable enough to be missed. When asked if she had any idea where he might have gone, she shook her head. "No," she said. "He would never just leave like this." The lie tasted metallic and wrong as it left her mouth; she felt it curl under her tongue like an ash she could not spit out.
She spent the afternoon constructing her alibi not as a manual but as a performance. It started with the mundane—groceries at the market, a receipt folded in her pocket that would later be proof she had been elsewhere; a friend she visited who would remember the sound of her laughter; a social media check-in that placed her in a café at the time the police later asked about. Each element was a small, necessary language of normalcy. She didn't think of them as tools so much as props: cues in a play where she had learned the part long before she had to act it. Her favourite play was Phantom of the Opera, the dramatic is what sold her.
When one of the officers came by to take photographs of the front door, Seraphine answered with the practiced warmth of a host. She brewed coffee and offered biscuits. Her hands felt foreign, efficient, as they poured the hot liquid into two cups and set them on a saucer. Conversation turned to the garden; she mentioned the sunflowers with a smile and described—without detail—how she had decided the yard needed a small bloom to lift the house. The officer smiled back, jotting notes about small domestic comforts. He did not look down at the ground where the petals would soon hide their history. She twisted her wedding ring in false worry.
At night the house learned how to be a stage. She moved through rooms in a choreography designed to survive inspection: the bed neatly made, towels folded the same way they always had been, the bookshelf spines aligned to give the impression nothing had been disturbed. Around midnight she would sit at the kitchen table and rehearse conversations she might have with friends, with the police, with herself. Her voice was soft, but the answers were sharp and pre-written—no hesitation allowed. If doubt wanted to creep in, she met it first.
Still, there were moments the performance could not hold. A child's laugh from the next street carried through the window and snagged something in her chest. The sound of her husband's old shirt—she had kept one for reasons she could no longer name—went to the closet and wrapped itself around her throat, impossible to breathe through. In those moments she went outside and pressed her hands to the damp soil, feeling the cool weight of the earth under her fingers. The sunflowers turned their faces toward the sun, innocent and uncompromising.
Rumors began to circulate, as rumors do. Someone had seen a late-night light, someone else had seen him arguing with a stranger. The police visited, then waited, then visited again. Papers requested statements. A cousin stopped by with a photograph to show her—him laughing, younger, unburdened—and Seraphine's throat tightened. She kept her face an even mask as she said, "He would never go without telling me," and received in return the look of someone who has, at last, been given a simple story to understand.
At dusk, when the garden fell into a blue hush, Seraphine would sit among the young stems and let the dark press against her like a hand. She thought of trust—what it was, what it cost—and how quickly it could calcify into something unrecognizable. There was no balm for what she had done; there was only the slow, astonishing realization that a life could be remade by small, relentless gestures: a turned spade, a planted seed, a line rehearsed a thousand times until it sounded true.
When someone asked her if she missed him, she would tilt her head and smile with the exact sorrow she had decided upon. "Of course," she would say. "I miss him terribly." It sounded right to other people. To the hollow place inside her, it sounded like forgiveness—an empty word she could carry like a talisman. A curse really.
Love, she thought sometimes when no one watched, could be a storm that leveled ruin and then asked you to rebuild on the same ground. She looked at the sunflowers and wondered if, once they rose tall and imperious, anyone would remember what lay beneath their roots. Until then, she would keep on performing—answering calls, handing over receipts, offering the same polite smile to those who leaned too close—until suspicion moved on or settled somewhere else. Either way, the garden would grow, and the truth would wait underground, patient as a seed.