That, finally, ended it. She had always been this willful. Even as a newborn, she’d kept her days and nights reversed for weeks, beating every method for reorienting babies I could find in books or on the Internet.

I was the one who stayed up with her, because I had the breasts. I’d learned to nap when she did, lying on my side in our king-size bed with her in the center, one palm on her chest, feeling the rhythm of her small breaths even in my sleep. One afternoon when she was about two weeks old, I woke to find Trey stretched out on the other side of her, propped up on an elbow, watching us with an odd, small smile on his face.

“What are you thinking?” I asked, sleepy and happy to have him home early.

He smiled wider, as if I’d caught him out, but he answered.

“I was thinking how the shape of us has changed. In ways I didn’t see coming.” I gave him a puzzled look, and he went on. “It’s like she’s this little pink dot, and you’re wrapped around her in a yellow warning circle. Then I’m wrapped around you, red. And nothing can get to you, much less her, unless it comes through me.”

I laughed. “Well, that sounds like a lot of manly bullshit.”

“I know, I know!” He chuckled. “Maybe it’s a mammal thing. Or maybe it’s because she’s so new and you’re so tired. Look, I know you’re not weak. I saw you push her out—you’re a superhero. But I still have this crazy urge to go punch a bear to prove I can protect you. Maybe when she’s older, and when you are up and about, I won’t feel this way. But now? I look at that floppy little thing and your tired eyes, and the shape of us feels like a bull’s-eye. The baby at the center, you around her, then me around you.”

It was manly bullshit, but I also liked it. He could be outermost ring in his shape, I decided, as long as I was the outer ring in mine. I had to be willing to wrap all the way around him and our baby and protect them, just as fierce and true.

I had been willing. Then. Now Robert was gone from our safe concentric circles. We’d been cored.

Trey didn’t even know it yet. I dreaded telling him. There were so many things we could say to each other, shattering, awful things that we would never be able to unhear. I’d been stupid, and I’d gotten so much wrong. I was the one who’d looked away from Robert. I’d been too afraid to call Trey or the police. I’d obeyed, blindly, and my decisions had led to Spence’s death. I could not bear it if my husband came at me, using all these things I blamed myself for as weapons, and yet I had such an ugly, blame-soaked question aimed at him. It was sour as bile, bubbling in the back of my throat.

What did you do?

As we drove through spats of dark, gray rain, I prayed hard that the answer would be, Nothing. It was Spencer. It frightened me, how badly I wanted the Wilkersons to say, Spencer Shaw? Oh, yes. We go way back, and we helped him do awful things. Illegal things to slant a court case his way, and of course, his partner, Trey, knew nothing.

It wouldn’t absolve me of my part in Spence’s death, but it would make it a little easier to live with. More important, it killed the awful question that felt like a gun in my hand, aimed at my husband. If Trey’s worst sin were being ignorant or blind to Spencer’s doings, then I’d already forgiven him.

Ever since they’d gone their separate ways in law school, Spence had been more colleague than friend, but Trey couldn’t cut Spence out entirely. They were family. They worked together at a firm where over half the partners were relatives of both by birth or marriage.

When we saw Spence socially, it was tied to a client dinner or some other work obligation. Trey sometimes hung out with Spence alone, especially as Spence’s marriages had failed, but he steered clear of Spence’s posse of hard-drinking male friends. That set went off on high-stakes Vegas weekends and booze-fueled hunting trips, and they were not averse to a little coke or speed or Adderall. Almost all of them were divorced. Some more than once, and for the same reasons that had broken up Spencer’s marriages. Trey kept a clean line between himself and all that. I knew this. I had seen it. So it made sense to me that Trey would not be part of Spencer’s darker legal doings either.

As we entered the Wilkersons’ neighborhood, I tried to set all this aside. These thoughts belonged wholly to Bree Cabbat, and I could not be her now. I packed away my daughters, safe with my vigilant mother, and my husband, flying home early for all the wrong reasons. Hardest of all, I tucked Robert, safe and sleeping, into a warm sanctuary at the bottom of my brain. I also tried to forget that Geoff was dead. I would soon be face-to-face with his parents. The character I was playing did not know what had happened to their son.

The rain eased to a drizzle as Marshall’s GPS guided us toward their house. The mother had spoken of the Wilkersons as if they were rich, but I’d taken that with a grain of salt. I knew from when I was little that even the lower rungs of the middle class looked pretty damn rich when you were poor. But this neighborhood was definitely upper-middle-class; gracious old Tudors and Colonials were mixed in with some outsize newer builds, all lining streets that spread out behind a country club, many with views of the golf course.

“How much do community-college professors make?” I asked.

“Not this much,” Marshall said, giving me a one-sided smile.

I knew that the boxy McMansion with its three tiers of symmetrical windows belonged to the Wilkersons before I saw the house number. It was the only home on the street with untrimmed bushes and a ragged lawn. They must have forgotten to schedule their service.

We cruised past. There was an older-model BMW parked in the drive, and the dark sky let us see that there were lights on inside.

“Someone’s home,” I said.

Marshall hadn’t called in advance. Calling would give them two hours to decide if they’d meet with us or what they’d tell us, and he wanted to see their reactions fresh. I’d worried that no one would be home, but if that were the case, Marshall planned to stake out the house while I took a rental car back to Decatur. No matter what, I had to be home before Trey. If he found our house empty, he might panic and call my mother or the police.

Marshall turned the corner before parking his old Taurus. We’d gotten a Lyft back to the Botanical Garden to pick it up. We left it out of sight and headed back down the street to the Wilkerson house; he didn’t want them to see the make and model or, worse, think to write down his plate number.