It had taken this broken girl literally tearing her husband open to make me see it. In the ruin of Kelly, I saw all the things I did not want to be. Tonight my husband, the man I loved, the father of my children, would be home. I wasn’t going to burn him up alive, no matter what his part in this. I couldn’t blame Trey for what the mother had chosen. I felt myself rewrapping, all the way, around my husband. No conditions, no requirements, and no limits. Me, then him, and then our girls and Robert, whom we must bring back into the safety of the middle. Our bull’s-eye.

“I’m Bree,” I told him, tucking three unbroken eggs back into their carton. “The man with your wife is Marshall, a private detective investigating a case similar to yours. He needs to ask you some questions.”

I helped him stand, though I wasn’t sure he’d understood half of what I’d told him. He seemed bewildered. I carried his grocery bags through and dumped them on the filthy kitchen counter. Kelly was sprawled on the sofa, face blotchy from weeping. Marshall sat up straighter as we entered, but she only glared. Her adrenaline was spent, and gin and Ativan were hard at work in her.

I went to her and took her by the shoulders. I told my new and bedrock truth to her, as she trembled, icy, in my arms. “Nothing your husband did, no matter what, deserves this. That old woman is the one who took them. She took two little boys who never did a damn thing wrong. It’s all on her.”

Her eyes shuddered closed, and she collapsed back against the sofa. Her husband hovered in the doorway, anxious, his pants wet with egg, slow blood in little trickles drying already on his cheek.

“Is she all right?” he asked.

“She took two Ativan and drank two shots of gin since we arrived. I think she had something else before we got here. We should keep an eye on her,” I told him.

He nodded, looking even more exhausted, and I got the sense that this was not the first time he’d seen his wife in this state. He turned to Marshall. “You know something about Geoff?”

The small flare of hope in his voice made me want out of the room. I believed with all my heart that he would recognize Spencer, be able to pinpoint the exact case that had started all this, but I didn’t want to watch as Marshall made him confess. It would be brutal, and I couldn’t bear it. Not knowing what I knew about his son, and with all my protective layers of character peeled off. I should get out of the way and let Marshall, untethered, press the truth out of him. I kept saying too much anyway, just as he’d feared.

I said, “Where do you keep your Band-Aids and Bactine? We need to disinfect those scratches.”

He blinked at me, owlish and confused behind his glasses, then waved me toward a little hallway off the kitchen. “In the laundry room. There’s a first-aid kit in the cabinets above the dryer.”

I hurried away. Behind me I could hear Marshall beginning our cover story. He was saying we had a suspect, but since we felt that my son’s safety depended on not involving the police, we would appreciate discretion. He didn’t say their son’s safety depended on it as well, but it was implied.

Ruthless, I thought, and yet I was so grateful to him. I was a better actor, but here we had no script, no fourth wall, no audience hungry only to be entertained. This was real. I sped up, and his voice faded as the hallway turned.

There were three doors in a horseshoe at the end. Adam Wilkerson hadn’t specified. I opened the one on the right and found a small office. One of the others must be the laundry, but I wanted to give Marshall time. I flipped on the light, revealing deep cranberry paint and walnut furniture that was old and very good. It didn’t go with what I’d seen in the rest of the house. The back wall was lined with shelves of leather-bound law books.

Like Trey, he had an office bar, built in behind the leather sofa. Blanton’s instead of Pappy. I felt a sharp surge of want. My hands were shaking. My whole insides, too. I walked over, reaching for the bottle.

A vertical row of three small photographs ran down the wall between the window and the bar. The center one, a five-by-seven in a pewter frame, caught my eye. My hand froze. The photo had been taken in front of a white house with tall columns. Azaleas framed a long porch with a blue banner festooned with gold Greek letters hanging from the rail.

I knew these columns, this porch. Even the bushes. Trey had a picture of this place in his own office. It was his old frat house.

I ripped the photo from the wall, held it in two hands. A row of boys stood on the lawn, young, grinning, arms around one another. New pledges? Adam Wilkerson was on the end. No beard back then, but his hairline had already been receding. He’d tried to hide it with a buzz cut. I recognized the round egg of his head and his small, sharp nose. I leaned in close to peer at his new brothers lined up on the lawn.

No Trey. No Spence either. No one I knew. But all that mattered was that my husband wasn’t there. I was dizzy with relief.

Then I looked past the pledges. To the place where my eyes did not want to go. The porch, where three older boys were grinning. The officers, I thought. Trey had been VP his senior year. Spence had been treasurer. Their faces were smaller than dimes, out of focus, but I knew my husband. I knew the shape of him, the body language. The young man to his right was Spencer Shaw.

This was a Trey I’d only seen in photos, young and cocky. Why was he here, small and blurry, grinning at me from the wall of Adam Wilkerson’s office?

My husband’s eyes were dark dots, unreadable. They held no answers. Meanwhile, up the hall, Marshall was asking Adam Wilkerson all the wrong questions.

This wasn’t about a law case. This was something so much older. This was something personal.

14

Marshall saw it, the moment Adam Wilkerson recognized Spencer and Trey. A micro-tic of the head, too small to be a flinch, but it was the ghost of one. Adam knew exactly who they were. More than that, Adam knew what the three of them had done to jump-start every awful thing that was happening now. Marshall would have bet his house on it.

Still, Adam kept staring at the picture. He pressed his lips together deliberately, then pushed his eyebrows into a puzzled shape. Pure theater.

Marshall was glad to know he could still call bullshit with such inner certainty. Back in his cop days, sitting one-on-one in small gray rooms, Marshall could smell fear and worry and self-justification coming off the guilty. He could almost hear their brains scrabbling against their skulls like little mice, the frantic scritch of claw on bone.