I hadn’t planned to make my point about the keys this quickly. Things were ahead of schedule because I’d burned my hand and Sarah was frantic to ease my suffering. It was starting to look as though my timing could have been a bit better.

“I wonder if I left them in the car,” Sarah said, more to herself than anyone else. “Except I remember unlocking the door and—”

The bulb went off. You could see it in her eyes. She knew exactly where to find those keys. She strode confidently through the front hall to the front door, opened it, her eyes drawn to the lock.

Things did not turn out as she’d expected.

“Oh shit,” she said. “I was sure I’d left them there. Did you leave the door unlocked when you went out?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Then they have to be in the car.” She took one step out of the house and froze. I couldn’t see her face at that point, with her back to me and all. But I had a pretty good idea how she must have looked. Dumbfounded. Dumbstruck. Panicked.

“Zack,” she said. Not screaming. More tentative. “Zack, Angie’s not home yet, is she?”

“No,” I said. As far as she knew, I was unaware that her Camry was no longer in the driveway. I came up behind her. “Listen,” I said, shaking my hand at my side, trying to make the sting go away. “I should tell you—”

“Shit! Shit! Shit! You were right! Shit! I did it! It’s all my fault. Jesus! Oh shit!”

She spun around and pushed by me on her way back into the house. She was headed straight for the kitchen, and I nearly had to run to catch up with her. She had the phone in her hand. “I’m going to have to call the police.”

“Sarah.” I didn’t want her to make the call. The last thing I wanted was the 911 operator getting another false alarm from this address.

“The car’s been stolen,” she confessed to me. “Shit, I can’t believe this. I don’t even know what I had in there. What did we have in the car? We had that stuff, from the trip, those Triptiks from the auto club, and a bag of old clothes in the trunk I was going to drop off at the Goodwill, and—”

“Don’t call,” I said.

“—not that that’s very valuable, but Jesus, we were going to give those to people who needed them, not some asshole who steals—”

“Put the phone down,” I said. But she wasn’t listening. She was about to punch in the number, so I reached down into my pocket, pulled out her set of keys, and set them on the kitchen counter where she could see them.