There was more. He remembered his promise that we would contact Kelly Wilkerson once this was all over. He now thought we shouldn’t. Kelly was no longer a person of interest; we’d told the police that Coral had taken Geoff, though no body had been found. I wondered what explanation her husband would offer. How well would it match Trey’s? He wouldn’t make himself the villain, surely. In his story would he follow Trey and Spence upstairs at all? We agreed there was no need to bother Kelly. She had grief enough, and whatever her husband’s story, I didn’t want to hear it.

Depressing topic, but I wanted to keep talking. Marshall had gotten Robert back. Listening to his voice, even as we discussed these awful things, was the safest I’d felt since we got home. But he needed to call Trey and update him, too. I let him go and went back inside to check on Robert, though I’d scarcely been away from him five minutes.

I went to the kitchen to sort out bills and put the junk mail in recycling, thinking. Coral had mailed her letter from in-state. It should come in the next day or two. I hadn’t told anyone about it. Not Trey, or the police, or Gabrielle, or even Leticia, who insisted that she was my lawyer and I should tell her everything. I hadn’t even told Marshall.

I had a decision to make first. Would I open it or burn it?

No story that Coral would tell could possibly match Trey’s. How could it, considering the source? Coral could know only what Lexie had shared with her. By all accounts Coral Lee Pine had been a strict and difficult parent. In the expurgated-for-Mother version, Lexie would not have confessed that she was the source for the drugs, or about the first threesome with Spence and Bonnie, or that she’d been the one to suggest another one with Trey. Nothing Lexie told her mother would mitigate what those three boys had done.

I hoped that I would burn it. The letter would not contain anything I could believe. Why give Coral’s version any space inside my head? Coral Lee Pine was a poisoner, and she had dripped enough darkness into me already. And yet I could still feel the cord of our strange connection. She’d written to me. I wanted to read it.

All this churning, and still the letter was only paper. Lexie was her mother’s flesh and blood, her will and fury. Until they found Lexie, I could not feel safe or believe that this was truly over. I wanted her caught, even if it meant she exposed my ugly role in Spence’s death. Marshall had told me to lie if that happened. Deny it. Accuse Lexie of protecting her mother’s memory or still trying to lash out at my family. It would be my word against hers, and I was a Cabbat. She was a junkie. My lie held more weight than her truth, but that echoed back against her history and my own in ways that sickened me. Nevertheless I had told him I would do it.

“She’s probably left the state anyway,” Trey said late that night, when he woke at two to find me mulling all this over, my hand resting on Robert’s busy little heart. “The guys I’ve hired are a precaution. If she has any sense, she’s long gone.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I’d whispered back, with absolutely no conviction.

For all Coral had said she was leaving her child out of it, I knew how dirty Lexie’s hands were. She had helped her mother stalk a toddler. Maybe she hadn’t known Coral’s plan in the beginning, but after Geoff’s murder she’d still helped Coral watch me. She’d let her mother take my child, too. Now Coral was dead with her plan only two-thirds complete. Would Lexie feel she had to finish it? She didn’t come from a family who let things go.

The next day the mail came at eleven, right on time. I put Robert into his bouncy chair and left him with Mills again. I walked down the drive, feeling Lexie’s eyes on me with every step I took.

I opened the mailbox, and there it was. I knew it at once. It was a white cardboard thing, the size of a sheet of paper, tucked between the smaller bills and larger catalogs. The only words on it were my name and address, the handwriting small and spidery, the letters crabbed together. No return address.

I grabbed the whole stack and hurried back inside. In my head, in the two minutes I’d been gone, Lexie had vaulted over the back fence, kicked down my back door, and taken Robert. It was a relief to see him peacefully napping in his chair, his pink mouth working a dream bottle.

Mills looked up from his book. “Everything okay?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to calm my breathing. “Can you sit with him? I’d love to grab a shower. He should sleep at least until noon, and I’ll have the baby monitor in case he wakes.”

“Sure,” Mills said. He was good with Robert, I’d discovered. Giant Mills with his eight-pack and his hooded eyes liked babies. His sister had two kids, he said. I found it touching, even sweet, and these days I took sweetness anywhere I found it.

I brought the mail back to my bedroom. I locked the door and leaned against it.

I would not read the letter. I’d decided. There was nothing Coral Lee Pine could tell me that was true. It would do me no good at all. I would take it to the master bath and burn it in the sink. I had a lighter in there for my scented candles. Trey had told me he saw our family as a bull’s-eye after Anna-Claire was born. The baby in the middle. Us around the baby in concentric circles. I realized now a bull’s-eye was a target. I could not weaken us with Lexie still unfound—and maybe aimed at us. I had to keep Robert and his sisters safe, at center, and I wanted Trey wrapped tight around them. To not read was to choose to wrap around them all, my husband included.

I dropped the pile of mail on the bed, then fished her envelope out from between the bills and glossy catalogs.

I was halfway to the bathroom before I registered the small red stamps running in a chain along the edge. A long envelope from Visa had hidden the words before.

photographs, do not bend. photographs, do not bend. photographs, do not bend.

24

This was how affairs began. Marshall should not be standing on Bree’s porch, readying to meet her one-on-one to talk about her problems with her husband. That was the first step in the How to Screw Up Someone’s Marriage handbook.

On the other hand, there wasn’t a universe where she called him weeping that way and he didn’t go to her. It didn’t feel physically possible.

She’d been so upset on the phone that he’d had a hard time understanding anything beyond the bare facts. Coral had sent a letter. An explanation, apparently, for all the damage she and her daughter had done. He hadn’t been able to make out much beyond that, she’d been sobbing so hard.