Marshall rubbed at his eyes, then nodded. He looked sick, but he stopped arguing. We would do this my way. He got up and gathered the coffee cups, taking them over to refill them. “It’s going to be a long night.”

It was. The longest. I was trying to decide what “morning” meant. A minute after midnight was the start. But midnight came and went with no call.

We got more coffee and went to sit on the big sectional sofa. Marshall moved the artifacts to the coffee table gingerly, hoping for fingerprints, I thought. But I’d already touched those things all over.

When Gabrielle finally finished her phone call and came back, I said, “We’ll talk about it later,” before she could begin.

She fell asleep around two, her bare feet propped on an ottoman. Marshall dozed as well, listing sideways on the sofa. I listed with him, until I looked up and saw Trey sitting across from me in his favorite chair. I wanted to run to him, hurl myself into his arms, but I was also instantly so angry.

What did you do? I yelled, and I was halfway to standing before I realized I’d been dreaming him.

Marshall snored lightly. Gabrielle didn’t stir.

The clock ticked, the long hours passed, I waited. I could almost feel the mother, somewhere far from me. I thought she might be awake, too, still holding my son. Deciding.

When Gabrielle woke up around five, I got a couple of new toothbrushes from my pantry stash. I sent her to the master bedroom to shower and then borrow any of my clothes she wanted. Marshall was up before she got back, and I sent him to the guest bathroom.

When they returned, their eyes were full of questions that they didn’t ask. It was almost sunrise. Gabrielle went back to staring at her phone, and Marshall took over pacing. Outside, the sky stayed dark, and I heard a growl of distant thunder. A storm was coming.

Dawn changed the blackness around the blinds to soft gray light. As the rain broke, patting and tapping at the roof, Gabrielle came over to sit down by me on the sofa. She’d borrowed some sweatpants and a T-shirt. She was both shorter and curvier than me, so my clothes simultaneously made her look very young and very sexy.

She took my hand. “Leticia said you could be liable, but she thinks you could claim necessity or duress. The threat of those defenses would help her get you a good deal, if they even want to prosecute. To be blunt, you’re white and you’re wealthy. We don’t think you’re risking prison time. We should talk to the police.”

I hadn’t considered prison. I should have. I’d killed a man. Not just any man. My husband’s childhood friend, his partner, his second cousin who had spent endless hours with my family. I knew how Spence had liked his gin and tonics, knew he ate his steak rare and his bacon burned near to ash. I’d once borrowed a swimsuit from his soon-to-be-ex-wife—no, his widow—after a client dinner at his house. Charlotte and I had changed in their master bedroom, and I’d found myself peeking at her naked body with a faint, nostalgic envy. She was built like me, tall and slim, but her breasts had never been baby-chewed. She’d had no stretch marks creeping silver up her toned abs.

I wondered if she knew yet that Spence was dead. She hated him, or so he’d cried to Trey. Would she be sad or relieved? I doubted that Spence had thought to change his will. The police might suspect her of the poisoning, actually, but she ought to be safe. She hadn’t been at the party.

I doubted I’d be a suspect either, if we stayed silent. I’d had no reason to want Spence dead. I still didn’t want him dead. I only wanted Robert.

“I want to wait until nine at least,” I told Gabrielle. “It’s rude to call anyone before that.”

I almost laughed when I heard myself say it. It was so surreal. As if the woman who’d stolen my baby and tricked me into killing Spence would be sitting by her phone, waiting out the clock for the sake of social mores.

A sound came from the coffee table, widening our eyes, stopping our breaths: the buzz of a phone against the antique brass.

I was up off the sofa, reaching, before I realized it was my own. I could see my husband’s handsome face smiling up at me from the lit screen.

“Trey,” I told them.

Marshall blew his breath out, his eyes on me kind and sorrowful, and in his gaze I understood that this was the end of it. The night was truly over, for all the storm was keeping us in darkness. She would not be calling.

I lifted the phone with shaking hands. Once I told my husband, it was real. Not just for me. For the girls. They would never trust anything again with the kind of innocence that they had now. It would change Trey, too, and our marriage. It would wreck my mom and leave Trey’s family reeling as well. I couldn’t see the world very clearly past this moment, but I saw enough to know it wasn’t a place where I wanted to live.

My free hand, of its own volition, pressed the red circle that sent Trey to voice mail.

I was not ready to give up. “She could still call. It’s still morning.” Until noon I would leave the world intact for the people I loved most.

Gabrielle’s voice was gentle. “You have to talk to your husband. He must know about Spence by now. My work-group texts are blowing up. If he doesn’t hear from you, he’ll call friends or family to come check on you.”

She was right. God, if he called Mom! She would panic. She would come straight over and bring the girls. Here, to this house, where the world was as frightening as she had always believed. I didn’t want the girls in this place, where life was dangerous and terrible and we were sheep, sweet and dumb, ready to be preyed on by monsters like the woman who’d taken Robert, or like my father. He was the one who’d made my mom see the world this way.

She’d started dating him when she was fourteen and he was twenty. When she was sixteen, she dropped out of school and they got married, left the state. She stayed with him, too, right up until she realized she was pregnant.

“I used to smoke. Did you know that?” she told me back when I was Peyton’s age and asking pushy questions. All I knew about my dad was that he was in prison. She wouldn’t tell me what state, much less the facility. I hadn’t yet connected this information to her nerves, her deep mistrust, her many calls to the police about noises on the roof or at the windows. In my aggrieved adolescent imagination, my father yearned to know me. He probably wrote me long, hopeful letters from his cell. Letters that my mother kept from me, unjustly, the same way she made me keep a chore chart and a ridiculous sunset curfew.