I hold my breath as I watch him lean on the doorbell. My phone rings, and I pick it up without taking my eyes off my laptop.

“Molly?”

“Mom, hi.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Fine.” The man looks like he’s giving up. I watch him turn and head down the porch steps. I strain to see if he has a phone in his hand. Will he try to call me? Is he the one who’s harassing me, or is he just a reporter looking for a story?

“Molly?”

“What?”

“Do you want Dad and me to come over?” I hear please say no in her voice.

“I’m okay, really.” I can just see the man’s car at the curb. He’s pulling away. I draw a deep breath. “I’m keeping busy around the house today. Maybe tomorrow would be better.”

We say our goodbyes, and I heave a sigh of relief.

My parents have been their usual perplexed selves. Mom calls daily to “check on me,” but they rely on Corrine to do the heavy lifting. That’s been their way from the start. Why not leverage that much older sibling, especially when the youngest wasn’t planned? When I was little, not long after we’d moved to Graybridge, my mother’s aunts came for a visit, and I heard my Aunt Ellen tell our neighbor that I’d been an oops baby. I thought that meant I was clumsy, which my mother was always saying was the case. But then I asked Corrine, and she told me I hadn’t been expected, whatever that meant. It was only years later that I realized why there was such a gap between me and Corrine and what the expression really meant.

My dad is an accountant and mom a math professor. Their lives were planned and ordered, and having me had been an aberration. Something they never quite figured out. Mom was working on her doctorate that fateful summer. She was up at the college when she entrusted me to our neighbor, Mrs. Arndt, on the day that would change all our lives. I’d been missing for hours before she got home and found out. I’ve never been able to quite rid myself of the feeling that I’d let them all down, ruined their lives. No one ever said that, of course, but people don’t have to say everything for you to feel it.

And now, just when they were comfortable that I’d married a man who would keep me from sinking back into the abyss, everything has gone to hell again, and I’m right in the center of it, dragging them down with me.

* * *

I need to take Sadie for her evening walk, so I check my camera feeds, look out the windows to make sure there’s no one around. The coast looks clear, and since it’s almost dark, I need to get going.