Behind Luca I could see his jeans and T-shirt in a crumpled heap on the bathroom rug. Typical teen boy, thank God. Here was my chance.

I said to Maddy, “Let me run to the restroom and we can go. Watch the baby?”

I stepped into the guest bath. Once the door was closed, I leaned down and picked up Luca’s wadded clothes. I folded the T-shirt neatly and set it on the counter. Then I picked up the jeans and ran my hands around the pockets.

He had a wallet in the back one. I took it out and flipped it open. A crisp twenty in the money pocket. No credit card, no insurance card, but a Maryland driver’s license. I didn’t know enough about that state to know how real it looked. It couldn’t be real, though, because the name on it was Luca Roux. I put it back and checked the front pockets.

I found Luca’s key ring. It was a lightweight metal bull’s face, goofy and cartoonish. Probably something from a meme I was too old to get or care about. A single key dangled from the ring in the bull’s nose. No car key. So Roux hadn’t given him free access to the purring red monster she’d jacked from Boyce, which either represented a little bit of responsible parenting or she had control issues.

I slipped the bull in my pocket, then stacked all of Luca’s clothes except his T-shirt neatly by the sink. I flushed the toilet for cover and took the T-shirt out with me.

“Hey, kids? I have bad news. I just realized we’re short a couple of air tanks.”

“Oh, man!” Maddy said. “I can’t go? I mean, I know it’s just the pool, but . . .”

“We don’t even have enough for me. I was counting on the nitrox upstairs, but I burned that on the morning dive I did the other day. It’s no big deal, I’ll run pick up some more. Can you keep Oliver? You and Luca can watch the last video.” I handed Luca his T-shirt. “Take the wet suit off so you don’t swelter. I’ll be gone half an hour, forty-five minutes tops.”

“Sure,” Mad said. She reached one easy hand out to the back of Luca’s suit, pulling the drawstring to undo his zipper. Her eyes lingered on the bare skin of his back.

“And, Mads, let Luca pay attention to the video, okay? You watch the baby,” I said.

“I will,” she said, too offhand for my liking.

“He needs to know this stuff so he can dive safely,” I told her, stern. I didn’t like leaving them alone. Not with the way she looked at him and all the ways he did not look at her. I didn’t want her doing things that would mean the world to her and be nothing more than opportunity and hormones for him. He was a nice kid, but he was still a teenager.

Mad was grinning. “You’re so mommitty sometimes.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. Oliver was yawning, but I hoped his nap would hold off until I returned. He’d make a pretty good chaperone. Since Oliver’s arrival Davis and I had learned firsthand how excellent babies were at preventing or at least interrupting sex.

Luca had struggled the rest of the way out of the wet suit, and Mad’s eyes slid sideways at his bare chest, lean and pale and smoothly muscled. He was oblivious, pulling his T-shirt on over his swimming trunks, but it didn’t set my mind wholly at ease. I’d stolen glances at Tig just like that a thousand times without him ever noticing. Until the night he did.

I went out through the garage, even though I wasn’t going to take my car. They were already chattering, wrapped up in the idea of the dive and each other. I checked my watch. Roux had left a good twenty minutes ago. By now she would have had time to change and leave. She was usually at the gym until after five. Or at least that was when Luca headed home.

I slipped out the garage’s side door, quick and quiet. I had less than an hour to break in and seek out Roux’s real and secret name. There was power in it, or she wouldn’t keep it hidden; I was going to find it.

I would find it even if I had to level the Sprite House to the ground.

14

On my way to Roux’s, I passed Tate’s good friend Lavonda out walking her big collie mix. We exchanged cool hellos. Inside, my stomach felt sour and hot, almost boiling, but long before I saw her, I was walking easy, hands swinging as if I hadn’t a care in the world. I didn’t even have to manufacture a smile for her; I had one ready-made, waiting for whoever needed it. She went right on by, though Lavonda could smell drama or distress from fifty paces. She lived for it, in fact, but she hadn’t smelled it coming off me.

I was getting better and better at this. I had always been good at it. My body had lied for me for years now, making itself regular and relaxed with Char. I’d even taught it to lie to me. The only difference was now I understood what I was doing.

I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

I didn’t see anyone outside when I got to the cul-de-sac, and the red car was gone. I let myself in with Luca’s key. Here was the same ugly den with its sad rental furniture, the Picasso still leaned on the mantel. The laptop sat open on the coffee table, but the screen was dark. Roux had claimed that it held only Luca’s games and schoolwork, but Roux lied. It might be chock-full of her secrets. I didn’t have the password, though, so I ignored it. There was already too much house and too little time. I had to think like Roux, then search smart instead of thorough.

I had seen criminals on television hide things inside toilet tanks, under area rugs, between mattresses and box springs. I’d seen multiple movies where bad guys in cheap hotels unscrewed the vents and hid fat wads of money or drugs or guns behind them. I’d seen that trick so much that my guess was Roux would never use it.

“Think, Amy,” I said aloud.

The house was Char’s, only backward, which meant I knew it intimately. I knew that the door in the foyer that looked like it would open on a coat closet was actually hiding the ill-placed furnace. I knew there was a small hatch up to the attic in the hallway outside the master. But these were places I might choose to hide things. I needed to think like Roux, not me.

I made myself stop and breathe. I had to pick a place and start. If it were me, I would want my secrets near me while I slept. It felt safer. Roux wasn’t all that interested in being safe, but she dripped sex and talked about it as if it were a craft. The bedroom was her power center. I went to it.

It was carpeted in a fuzzy shag so old that the color had become unnameable. Something between sludge and old oatmeal. There was a matchy-matchy pecan bedroom set straight out of the eighties, with large round bulbs on the legs of the dresser and the posts on the queen-size bed. The bed itself was a mess, five or six pillows tossed about, and the sheets frothed up like a heap of meringue. Either Roux was a restless sleeper or she’d had company. I touched the pile of bedding. It had not come with the house. The sheets and the duvet looked and felt like something from a five-star hotel.

I searched the dresser first. I doubted Roux would hide things in her panty drawer like a thirteen-year-old girl with a hot-pink diary, but she might tape something to the undersides of the drawers, or behind them. I checked every hidden surface, especially behind the mirror—a very Roux-like spot. I could imagine her here, preening and primping, knowing that as she looked at herself, she was also looking at her secrets.

Nothing.

The master had two long, shallow closets, side by side, taking up an entire wall. All four louvered folding doors were cocked askew. The one closer to me held dive gear, all of it high-end. In the other a row of her beautiful dresses hung beside a shelving unit filled with folded items, the fabrics all expensive and the tailoring exquisite.

Rummaging through her clothes felt weirdly intimate. She had searched me, and now it was as if I were searching her back, running my hands over the shape of her body. She had a lot of shoes. Heels, sandals, flats, booties in buttery-soft leather. They stood in a tidy triple row, filling the floor entirely, but they yielded nothing when I knelt and jammed my hands into them.

There was a bedside table on the far side, under the window. It had a single, shallow drawer. I opened it, releasing the scent of patchouli and almond oil, and saw a box of condoms, a pale blue vibrator shaped like a large-caliber bullet, and a row of lubrication and massage oils. To use on lawyers, I thought bitterly. Behind all this was a vape kit and some boxed cartridges, each containing a different kind of pot. If I were looking for her power center, here it was, and yet I found nothing taped to the bottom or behind this drawer either.

I closed it a little too hard, frustrated, and at the exact same time, I heard the unmistakable sound of another door opening. The front door. The sound of footsteps, light and rapid, were already coming down the hall toward me. I hadn’t heard the purring of that sleek red car. I had almost no warning.