It was nearly four in the morning when I shut down the computer and tiptoed back upstairs, sliding into bed beside Burke. I dreamed of Libby and Skye and Gus and Langs Valley, the fractured images already slipping away when I woke up hours later in a cold sweat.

I started checking Skye’s profile every time I logged on to Facebook, which was often several times a day, and saw her life transpire before me. I watched her high school graduation followed by her lazy postgrad summer on Nantucket. I followed her college years at Barnard, filled with parties and boozy dinners at edgy New York restaurants. I watched her semester abroad in Rome, her luxurious family vacations to places like St. Barths and Cape Town and the Alps and countless weekends in Palm Beach. I saw her graduate from college with a major in English, magna cum laude. I watched as she started a career in book publishing, following in her mother’s footsteps. The posts and photos became less frequent after her college years, but the content was enough to keep me in the general loop. Outside of work, Skye’s early twenties in New York seemed to be filled with dinner parties and wild weekends at summer share houses in the Hamptons. She didn’t see her brother much; he’d gotten married to his longtime girlfriend and they lived in San Francisco. Her best friends were still the same three girls from high school.

What struck me was the perpetual absence of a boyfriend in Skye’s life. She continued to be beautiful—her striking, heart-shaped face eerily identical to Libby’s—with a high-end, consistently updated wardrobe. I didn’t understand the lack of romance in her life.

One suspect did begin to appear in some of her tagged pictures in 2013—a good-looking guy with dirty-blond hair named Max LaPointe. But the photos didn’t make it clear if their dynamic was romantic; perhaps it was merely a casual fling, or nothing at all. Her captions had a forced quality to them, as if she was playing at being a cool girl.

Skye didn’t post much on Facebook at that point; when she did, it was usually about the Libby Fontaine Foundation, a fund that had been created in Skye’s mother’s name on the ten-year anniversary of her death. The existence of the foundation made my blood boil, as did the sight of Skye’s posts asking her Facebook friends to donate in honor of her “selfless, generous” mom. As if the family needed to be asking for other people’s money. As if Libby—a selfish, entitled murderer—deserved to have her life honored while Gus’s existence had essentially been erased.

I noticed when Max LaPointe liked one of Skye’s posts about the foundation and donated to the fund, but I still couldn’t figure out if he was her boyfriend.

In the fall of 2017 the truth about Skye’s love life was revealed to me. By then I’d quit working at the store and had started driving for Uber. It was humiliating, my having resorted to such a blue-collar job, but the money was better and I could work longer hours, and with Hope in college and Maggie soon to be, we desperately needed to up our income. Burke seemed to have plateaued at PK Adamson; he hadn’t gotten more than a 15 percent raise cumulatively in the past decade. He was still making less than his first-year analyst salary at Credit Suisse, which I hated to think about because it made me so depressed. Even though he’d studied for and aced his CFA exam, PK Adamson had since emphasized that because of his record, they’d never be able to place him on the CFA track. The more I learned about the industry, the less I understood why this came as such a shock to Burke—insider trading was more or less homicide in the financial world. He was lucky to be employed by a wealth management firm at all.

Driving for Uber was certainly nothing to write home about, but I preferred it to the Kitchen Kettle because I could make my own schedule. And I’d never minded driving. One Friday in early October I decided to take the morning off and spend a few lazy hours in bed, drinking coffee and trolling the internet on my laptop. As was second nature by then, I logged on to Julia Miller’s Facebook to check Skye’s profile.

I wasn’t expecting to find much, but my attention snapped to life when I saw a new post from Skye from the previous evening. It was a link to a blog post on the Libby Fontaine Foundation website: “Sixteen Years Without My Mother” by Skye Starling.

I clicked the link, adrenaline shooting through my bloodstream as I began reading. In the post, Skye shared the struggles she’d faced since losing her mother at age twelve. Namely, she wrote about her battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder, with which she’d been diagnosed just after Libby died. Skye revealed how the disease had become a regular obstruction in her career and relationships and added:

This isn’t something that’s easy for me to disclose. But my mom believed in finding transformation and connection in your most painful experiences. She may be gone, but she’ll always be my greatest role model—the woman I will strive to emulate, who’s still teaching me lessons every day. This year, the Libby Fontaine Foundation will match all donations and give that amount to the Yale OCD Research Clinic.

When I’d read the post twice, I leaned back into my pillows, thoroughly stunned. There it was—the explanation I’d been seeking for years. Skye wasn’t a closeted lesbian. She was mentally ill.

White-hot anger struck through my bones. Libby never “found transformation and connection” through “painful experiences.” Instead, she hid from them. She hid from what she did to Gus—she took it to her grave. She was a liar and a hypocrite whose daughter was clearly cut from the same cloth of delusion and entitlement—a daughter who was obsessed with her, who wanted to be exactly like her.

The Big Plan must’ve begun to form in some small, dormant crevice of my mind long before I became aware of it. In retrospect I see that my obsession with the Starlings had to have still lingered after nearly thirty years for a reason. But this Facebook post illuminated my path to closure.

Burke and I had never broken out of the middle class. We were never not behind on bills, mortgage payments, tuition checks. After all these years we still clipped coupons and bought furniture at tag sales and shared a car. I’d been forced to accept that money—real money, the kind I’d planned for—was out of the question for us.

Or had I? Is it possible to give up on the things you seek in the deepest, most sacred corner of your heart? Or do they stay in your subconscious, persisting, festering, always subliminally searching for a way out?

All I knew was that when the Big Plan revealed itself to me, I was ready for it. I also understood that for it to succeed, its execution would require elaborate plotting and precision. The hard part would be getting Burke on board. If nothing else, Burke prided himself on being a father and a family man. But that quality was a double-edged sword, and I could use it to my advantage. All I had to do was make him question the well-being of his children and remind him that he was the reason for our family’s struggles.

That’s why the first step had to be to make our financial position even more dire. Throughout the fall, I complained to Burke that he still hadn’t followed through on his long-standing pledge to renovate the master bathroom, which was hideously decorated in dated brown tile. He’d been promising me a Jacuzzi tub and sleek white marble since we bought the house seventeen years earlier. We had the money stored away, I reasoned; we could afford it.

“I don’t know, Bones.” Burke had hesitated. “Remember we got that estimate and it’s going to be at least ten grand. That’s too much out of our savings.”

But I continued to pester him, arguing that the renovation would increase the resale value of the house, which we needed to think about anyway since we were soon becoming empty nesters. He finally conceded.

As a belated birthday gift for Burke, I gifted him a half dozen sessions of couples counseling with good old you, Dr. K. The fall issue of Seasons of New Haven had named you one of the top marriage and family therapists in the region, and you didn’t take insurance. Perfect.

When I told Burke about couples therapy, he’d discreetly rolled his eyes, the way he did whenever I gave him a present that wasn’t so much a gift as a dent in our bank account. But when I feigned tears and told him I was seriously worried about our marriage, he agreed to go.