It’s dark everywhere. Rachel lets herself in and puts the bag down. Her office is spooky this late. She can smell the whole night on her, forest and fear, gin and tonic, that other wife, Padgett, muttering in the bar while her heart terrible thumped. She wants it all off her. She strips there and stands naked in the hall, peeking first at Nicky and then at her husband, still silent in bed. Her guilt, her loss is a beesting, forever lodged it feels. She is hunched and cold, her arms goose-pimpled and her breasts shrunken like the sea-wrecked last of a sandcastle. She showers in the off-putting splendor of scented soap, crying a little. She thinks of Reynard vanished—bought off, is how he put it, but he didn’t take the money, just disappeared into a dark so dark it felt like everything had disappeared already. Where are you, where did you go, she is thinking, about the vanished man or herself. It feels like she is even asking the innocent man she married, waiting dreaming in the bed.

The shower doesn’t wake anyone. Rachel wraps herself up and, before slipping into the dark bedroom, takes one track-covering look at her office. The bag looks wrong, and when she opens it, dripping, it’s true. By the late light she can see the money is absolutely gone. She looks around the room, the lay of the land, and back inside the paper bag, creased and translucent like new skin. She asks it again, she will keep asking.

Where are you, where did you go.

Chapter Eight

CHAPTER 8