Chapter 2: The Crooked Screen Door on Anson Street
Two months earlier, April had arrived in Charleston the way it always did—slow, heavy, and drenched in humidity. The azaleas were opening on Tradd Street like small acts of colorful confession.
Silas Renwick signed the lease on the Anson Street cottage on the fourteenth. He handed the landlord a cashier’s check drawn on a quiet Boston account.
“Six months in advance?” the landlord asked, squinting at the bank logo. “You boys in the trades must be having a good year up north.”
“It pays the bills,” Silas replied evenly, his face an unreadable mask. “Are the keys ready?”
The cottage was incredibly small. Two bedrooms, a sagging porch with a single wooden rocking chair, and a massive magnolia tree in the back.
When the wind blew off the harbor, the magnolia’s thick branches scraped violently against the rusted gutters. Eight-year-old Ren picked her bedroom immediately, throwing her stuffed bear onto the mattress.
Silas took the smaller room near the back.
On their second morning, Ren tugged on Silas’s denim shirt. “Daddy, the door is broken,” she announced, pointing a sticky finger toward the back porch.
Silas walked over and knelt beside the screen door. The bottom hinge was stripped, rusted entirely through from decades of coastal salt air.
“The hinge is old, sweetie,” Silas murmured, running his calloused thumb over the jagged metal. “I’ll fix it this afternoon.”
“Promise?” Ren asked, tilting her head, her dark braid falling loosely over one shoulder.
“I promise,” he lied softly.
He did not fix it that day. He did not fix it that week, nor the week after.
The door stayed crooked and difficult to close. For Silas, the only way to make sense of leaving his entire life in Boston was to let small Charleston things be exactly as broken as they were.
That evening, he sat at the cramped kitchen table and pulled out an old, creased envelope. Inside was a single photograph of a woman in a yellow cotton dress, laughing in front of a magnolia tree.
“Daddy, where are we?” Ren asked, wandering into the kitchen barefoot, holding a half-eaten saltine cracker.
Silas looked at the back of the photograph for a long, agonizing moment. His chest tightened as the phantom grief flared up.
“We are exactly where Mommy used to be,” Silas whispered, his voice cracking just a fraction.
Ren nodded seriously, as if that explained the entire universe. “Okay. When is dinner?”
