All day I’d had this weird, unavoidable feeling that things were just off. Of course they were. My husband was in jail. The discovery had come in. To top it off, I was still feeling a little weird about everything that had gone down at the mommune last night. And how Oliver said he’d be out of touch for a few days. And the heaviness of thinking about the potential New York move and what that could mean. And, of course, I hated when my daughter was mad at me. I was very much of the school of thought that I was her mother and not her best friend, but still. I liked it when she was happy. Anyway, anxiety increases anxiety, right?

I went to get my phone between clients to text her. I wouldn’t apologize necessarily. Not yet. I’d go with something sort of neutral. Maybe, Want to grab burgers tonight after practice? Something that would make her happy (because it wasn’t vegan!) but not suggest that I was sucking up. I rustled around in my bag for a minute before it hit me: I had left my phone at home. I looked at the time in the corner of my computer screen. I had twenty minutes until my next client. I could probably make it. If I was really efficient, maybe I could even grab a coffee too.

As I drove, I thought about the day in the bank when Alice had taken me back to the house, when she’d asked us to live with her. What if I had said no? Would we have been better off? But no. Look at all the good that had come from that one chance meeting. I had made three friends who’d changed my life, and Iris and I had had a place to lick our wounds while we got back on our feet. One bad dinner wasn’t going to make me second-guess everything.

I ran up the back steps to the mommune and flung the door open, calling, “Alice! Grace! Julie!” No answer. I grabbed the leather pouch on the hall table where we stowed our phones. My phone wasn’t there—but Iris’s was. Along with another one that I thought was potentially Alice’s, but I wasn’t positive. That was weird. Maybe she had accidentally taken mine. “Shit!” I said out loud. “I knew I shouldn’t have given in to that dumb rule.”

I ran up the stairs into Alice’s room. “Alice!” No one answered. I looked around and peeked out on the porch. No Alice. Where was she?

As I glanced around her room, scanning the surfaces to make sure my phone hadn’t somehow gotten up here, something caught my eye: a church bulletin stuck in the mirror above the dresser. A line had been highlighted: Vengeance is mine.

Vengeance. Good Lord. That was creepy. Was Alice that mad at her sister?