In the space of half a breath, I’d forgotten he was gone. It almost undid me. I froze, fighting back a wave of tears and panic. I’d read about something like this happening to people who had lost a limb. They would reach out with a hand that wasn’t there or feel cramping in a foot they no longer owned.

I stood abruptly, turning to the built-in drawers behind me. I kept my jewelry in the top two. I opened the lower one, which held costume jewelry and some older pieces. The bracelet I wanted, a chunky gold thing meant to be worn above the elbow, was all the way in the back. It felt too young for me now, and ever since I’d had the girls, it was a little tight. I wanted that, though. The bite of that cold metal in my flesh.

I pushed it up my arm until it pinched, then nodded, calmer. I could not forget myself again. I could not keep reaching for him. It would break me down, and I would fail.

The bracelet would help. It was a trick I’d learned in a college acting class, what felt like a thousand years ago. If some real-life sorrow or anxiety was pulling me out of a role, I could use something physical to locate that distraction in my body. I’d pack my pain or worry inside the squeeze of a tight shoe or the tug of a ponytail holder. Then the rest of my body was free to become someone else.

I’d used a variation of the trick all three times I’d been in labor. I’d pinched the tender spot between my thumb and forefinger as each contraction hit, moving myself into the small pain while my body heaved and surged. The trick had worked in the early stages, until some animal inside me took over and I was nothing more than a will to push.

I was still a mother, but separated from all that made me so. I had to put Robert’s absence into the constriction of the bracelet. I put my fear there, too, the whole choking cloud of it. And my anger with my husband, which was quickly changing into a pure, wild rage at Spence, as cold and clear and biting as grain alcohol. I added my desperate longing for Trey to be here with me, my surges of desire to call the police, and most of all my paralyzing love for my child. I had to let some other woman ride my body.

Be Betsy, I thought then. She’d been bolder than me, always, and dead calm in a crisis. Betsy had owned any room she’d entered. I could almost feel her presence closing over me. My best friend, gone but still saving me.

“You want me to roofie Spencer Shaw?” I sounded as incredulous as I felt. “You want Spence to . . . what? To not remember tonight? Why?”

“Don’t you worry about that. Just you worry about your part.”

Her voice was still gentle. We spoke softly to keep Robert asleep, but the near whispers seemed to pull us closer. Her voice, breathy in my ear, was so intimate, and I desperately wanted to please her. I wanted her to like me. Hell, a small, crazy part of me wanted to like her, too, because she had me wholly in her power. I needed to believe there was sweetness in her. That she liked babies and would be kind to mine. That if I did exactly what she said, she’d give him back.

I said, “Help me understand why you’d do this. I know it’s not money. Can you please tell me what you really want?”

Her voice dropped even lower. “What I want, you can’t give me. Not direct.”

“Maybe I can help you get it. If you—”

“I want to put the world right. I want what’s fair,” she interrupted, and it was a cry right from the center of her. It shook her voice into something younger somehow, because the world was not fair, and anyone her age already knew that. “If you drug Spencer Shaw, I can make him do right by us.”

I felt the power between us shift, just a bit. I had asked, and she had answered. She had given me something. “But it’s not fair to take Robert.” I used her word. “He’s innocent. I don’t know you, but I don’t think I ever did you wrong?” I made it a question, afraid of angering her.

I heard that thinking little hum she’d made before. “I am sorry for that.” It sounded like she meant it. “This isn’t about you, and I’m not without feeling. I know it’s hard, especially for a girl like you. You were raised soft, everything laid out on a pillow. Most folks open their eyes onto a harsher world.”

I had to protest this. “I’m not soft.”

She didn’t believe me. I could tell. She made a click noise with her tongue, almost a tutting sound, then said, “You married who you married, and he chose to work hand in glove with Spencer Shaw. So here we are. It’s not fair to you. But I am nigh out of time, and what happened to me and my daughter—it’s not fair either.”

Her voice stayed quiet, but I heard steel beneath it as she spoke about her child. This was the part of her I understood most, feared least. The part that clearly loved her daughter. I had no name for this woman, but of all the things I’d seen her be—kidnapper, stalker, witch—she was somehow tying herself tightest to this one: mother. A warm word, but so cold and strange when it was touching her. My own sweet-hearted, timid little mother was never called that. I called her Mom. Mama when I was small. Peyton had only just this year given up Mommy.

This woman, this mother, said to me, “Before I leave this earth, I am going to set things right.”

I smoothed on foundation, thinking hard. “Fair” might be the only word she’d said that truly mattered, if I wasn’t going to be blindly obedient. It was a clue to who she was and why she’d done this awful thing, and yet my mind shied from pursuing these questions further. She had Robert in her arms. She’d told me if she saw or heard any sign of the police, she would twist his— The very thought brought me back to her heel, obedient and good.

I wanted to please her. I wanted to turn the things she’d said about fairness into a story that would make her into the kind of person who would do right by me and my son.

But what if this feeling of communion were only in my head? If I could figure out who she was, what wrong she was trying to set right, then I should. In case things went wrong. In case I couldn’t get the pills down Spence, or she was lying, or she changed her mind.

Fairness. I turned the word over and over as I gave myself a smoky eye. Fairness was a thing people went to courtrooms to try to get, though Trey often joked that in his job cash trumped fairness every time. Was this about one of Trey and Spence’s lawsuits? Had Spence bent or broken a rule?

They’d worked together on so many cases, including the large, uneasy merger that had taken Trey off to Chicago. What had Trey said about it? This is not a marriage of equals we’re officiating. Our groom is a cannibal.