“How did we plan to do that?” I ask as he grows lax and his hand loses its grip on my wrist. I try to pull free, but just like that, he reengages, clinging tighter to me.

His answer is so sure. “Botox,” he says with another shrug. “You said you could get it.”

Botox. Botulinum toxin. Which we stocked at the hospital because it treats migraines, symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and a host of other conditions. But it can be fatal, too. It’s one of the deadliest substances in the world.

“Or stabbing them all,” he says, telling me how we’d decided that was the best way because he didn’t have to wait for poison, and a knife was easier to hide in his backpack than bottles of lighter fluid. He could do it right away. The very next day.

“We went inside,” Otto reminds me. “Remember, Mom? We climbed back in the window and went to look over all the knives, to see which would be best. You decided,” he tells me, explaining how I chose the chef knife because of its size.

According to Otto, I then took out Will’s whetstone and sharpened the knife. I said something canny about how a sharp knife is safer than a dull one, before smiling at him. Then I slipped it in his backpack in the soft laptop sleeve, behind all of his other belongings. As I zipped the backpack closed, I winked at him.

You don’t have to worry about getting an organ, Otto says that I said. Any old artery will do.

My stomach roils at the thought of it. My free hand rises to my mouth as bile inches up my esophagus. I want to scream, No! That he’s wrong. That I never said such a thing. That he’s making this all up.

But before I can reply, Otto is telling me that before he went to bed that night I said to him, Don’t let anyone laugh at you. You shut them up if they do.

That night Otto slept better than he had in a long time.

But the next morning, he had second thoughts about it. He was suddenly scared.

But I wasn’t there to talk it through. I’d gone in to work for the day. He called me. That I remember, a voice mail on my phone that I didn’t discover until later that night. Mom, he’d said. It’s me. I really need to talk to you.

But by the time I heard the voice mail, it was done. Otto had taken that knife to school. By the grace of God, no one was hurt.

Listening to Otto speak, I realize one gut-wrenching truth. He doesn’t think that he’s made this story up. He believes it. In his mind, I am the one who packed the knife in his backpack; I am the one who lied.

I can’t help myself. I reach up with my one free hand and trace his jawline. His body stiffens but he doesn’t retreat. He lets me touch him. There is hair there, only a small patch of it that will one day grow to a beard. How did the little boy who once lacerated his thumb on the blade of Will’s razor grow old enough to shave? His hair hangs in his eyes. I brush it back, seeing that his eyes lack all the hostility they usually have, but are instead drowning in pain.

“If I hurt you in any way,” I whisper, “I’m sorry. I would never do anything to intentionally hurt you.”

Only then does he acquiesce. He lets go of my wrist and I step quickly back.

“Why don’t you go lie down in your room,” I suggest. “I’ll bring you toast.”

“I’m not hungry,” Otto grunts.

“How about juice, then?”

He ignores me.

I watch, grateful that he turns and lumbers up the stairs to his bedroom, backpack still clinging to his back.

I go to the first-floor study and close the door. I hurry to the computer on the desk and open the browser. I go to look up the website to the ferry company to search for news on delays. I’m anxious for Will to be home. I want to tell him about my conversation with Otto. I want to go to the police. I don’t want to wait anymore to do these things.

If it wasn’t for the weather, I’d leave. Tell Otto I’m running out on an errand and not come back until Will is here.

As I begin to type in the browser, a history of past internet searches greets me.

My breath leaves me. Because Erin Sabine’s name is in the search history. Someone has been looking up Will’s former fiancée. Will, I assume, feeling nostalgic on the twenty-year anniversary of her death.

I have no self-control. I click on the link.

Images greet me. An article, too, a report from twenty years ago on Erin’s death. There are photographs included in the article. One is of a car being excavated from an icy pond. Emergency crews hover solemnly in the background while a wrecker truck lugs the car from the water. I read through the article. It’s just as Will told me. Erin lost control of her car in a wicked winter storm like the one we’re having today; she drowned.

The second image is of Erin with her family. There are four of them: a mother, a father, Erin and a younger sister who looks to me somewhere in between Otto’s and Tate’s ages. Ten, maybe eleven. The photograph is professional-looking. The family is in a street between an avenue of trees. The mother sits on a garish yellow chair that’s been placed there for purposes of this photograph. Her family stands around her, the girls leaning into their mother indulgently.

It’s the mother I can’t take my eyes off of. There’s something about her that nags at me, a round woman with shoulder-length brunette hair. Something strikes a chord, but I don’t know what. Something that hovers just out of the periphery of my mind. Who is she?

The dogs begin to howl just then. I hear it all the way from here. They’ve finally had enough of this storm. They want to come inside.

I rise from the desk. I let myself out of the study, padding quickly to the kitchen, where I yank open the back door. I step outside, onto the deck, hissing to the dogs to come. But they don’t come.

I move across the yard. The dogs are both frozen like statues in the corner. They’ve caught something, a rabbit or a squirrel. I have to stop them before they eat the poor thing, and in my mind’s eye I see the white snow riddled with animal blood.