How many of their clients had been cannibals? Could I narrow it down?

I striped my lids in black liner, thinking. If this was about a case, she was not their client. A client could have simply made a date for drinks with Spence and doped him up herself. Also, she didn’t talk like someone who’d be a main player in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. Her accent sounded like my mom’s. Like mine, before my college adviser told me, No one is going to cast a redneck Juliet, and registered me for dialect class.

She was from the small-town South, like me. Had her family been caught in the cross fire of something big and cold and corporate?

She was sick, she’d said. Was her daughter sick, too? Perhaps a client of Spence’s had done something with chemicals or food or the groundwater that had made them sick. Or perhaps she’d lost her job in some merger and with it the health insurance that could have cured whatever was now killing her.

I shook my head. It could be one of a hundred cases, some decades old. Without more details, all I could do was hope she’d taken Robert to get something concrete from Spence—information, a file, a taped admission of wrongdoing—because I could help her do that. I could drug him so he wouldn’t remember giving it to her. I could do it for Robert.

“Will the drug hurt Spence? Three seems like a lot.” I was afraid to question her, but I didn’t want to harm Spence.

Though if I had to roofie someone . . . Spence took advantage of my husband, skated close around ethical corners, and I didn’t love how he treated women. There was a basic disrespect there, in the way he talked over us at dinner parties or let his eyes drop lower than our faces. He’d cheated on both his wives. If whatever she took from him during his lost time cost him money or embarrassment, even his career, I would not regret it. Not if I got Robert back.

She said, “He’s a big man. Tall and broad, carrying some extra weight. One won’t do it. Two might, but I can’t play with ‘might.’ Three is sure, so make it three. My daughter will be watching, waiting for the drugs to hit.”

Her daughter would be at the party? I asked a question without thinking. “If she’s there, can’t she just give him—”

She interrupted, her voice harsh. “You think we didn’t try? We went to his office before. We couldn’t even get past that receptionist. But you? He’ll talk to you. He’ll be sweet and drink whatever you give him. Because you matter.”

“I only matter because I married Trey,” I said, but she was still talking.

“That receptionist wouldn’t so much as give us an appointment. I insisted, said I needed a lawyer, and she tried to pawn me off on some little bitty black girl who passed by. That child didn’t look half old enough to be a lawyer. He didn’t have time for the likes of us. We don’t blend with your kind of people.”

“My kind of people?” She was saying I was soft again. A noise came out of me. Not a laugh, but related. “Everyone at this party belongs to Trey. I don’t blend either.” I faltered at the end, because in midsentence I knew that what I was saying wasn’t true. I might not be fully at home with Trey’s old-money Buckhead crowd, but I wasn’t like her. Not anymore. “I know how to look the part. I’ve been married sixteen years. But I grew up in Hurd County, just me and my mom.” She hadn’t mentioned a husband, and I’d never met my father. Our families sounded similar. If she knew how much she had in common with my own mother, she might feel softer toward me. “I didn’t have a college fund or private school. We lived in a two-bedroom ranch house that leaked every time it rained.” I could also hear myself easing a little more South into my vowels. Nothing obvious. Not fake so much as regressive. One step closer to seventeen-year-old Sabreena Kroger’s diction. “Every fall my mom would drive me two towns over to go to the Goodwill there, so my ‘new’ school clothes wouldn’t be recognized by whoever threw them out.”

All these things were true, but when Betsy died, I’d lost my strongest tie to the girl I’d been before my marriage. I had no reason to visit my old neighborhood since my mom’s move. Perhaps I’d gotten soft, spoiled. These days Marshall sure treated me as if he thought I was an overpampered deb. But I hoped she’d see the girl I used to be. That girl was likely not too different from her own child. I waited, barely breathing, until she answered.

“I did that Goodwill trick, too. When my daughter was small.”

I felt the cord of connection thicken between us.

I sat back down at the vanity, the bracelet chafing me. The haunted rag doll I had picked up off the floor was gone, replaced by a pretty woman with high cheekbones and a glossy, pale mouth.

Trey loved me in a short dress and heels. If he were here, ready to take me to the party in his tuxedo, if everything were normal, he would dance me around, singing “Wonderful Tonight.” How was it that my baby was missing and yet I could still make this woman in the mirror smile? It even lit her eyes.

Theatre, I thought, though I’d gotten married less than a year after college graduation. I’d been in exactly one professional play, at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, winning the role of Syl in Traps over pros with Equity and SAG cards. I’d done it to prove that marrying Trey instead of going to New York was my actual choice, not simply fear that I didn’t have what it took. Now I was grateful for every play I’d ever done, every class I’d taken, every workshop, because they let me be two things at once: a howling mother-monster, mad with fear, and this bold-eyed, smiling woman.

Or maybe the training and the practice didn’t matter. This was my child. Tiny little women picked cars up off their babies. They sold their bodies. They killed. They died. I could smile at a goddamn party and get a spiked drink down a man who loved a cocktail.

“You sure look like you belong. I seen your car. Your shoes. You walk like you own everything you see.” As she talked, Robert woke up. All at once it became so hard to concentrate. I heard him sigh, and then the little noises he made while stretching. “Just a minute.”

I heard the clunk of the phone onto a hard surface. A dashboard? Robert fussed, and she was talking to him in a comforting murmur that ebbed and flowed as she rustled around. Then, in a place far from me, off a highway in a car that I could not imagine, I could hear Robert eating.