“You didn’t ask him?”

“I didn’t want to push him about it. It was obviously a big deal already; I didn’t want to make it even bigger. So I just went, Right. OK. I’m going to make everything lovely for him. I’m going to show him we’re fine.” Jenny’s chin came up, remembering, and I caught that flash of steel. “I’d always had the house nice, but I started keeping it totally perfect, like not a crumb anywhere—even if I was wrecked, I cleaned the whole kitchen before I went to bed, so when Pat came down for breakfast it’d be spotless. I’d take the kids picking wildflowers so we’d have something to put in the vases. When the kids needed clothes I got them secondhand, off eBay—nice clothes, but God, a couple of years ago I’d’ve died sooner than put them in secondhand stuff—but it meant I had enough money left to get decent food that Pat liked, steak for dinner sometimes. It was like, Look, everything’s OK, see? We can totally handle this; it’s not like we’re going to turn into skangers overnight. We’re still us.”

Probably Richie would have seen a spoiled middle-class princess whose sense of herself was too shallow to survive without pesto salad and designer shoes. I saw a frail, doomed gallantry that broke my heart. I saw a girl who thought she had built a fortress against the wild sea, braced at the door with all her pathetic weapons, fighting her heart out while the water seeped past her.

I said, “But everything wasn’t OK.”

“No. It so wasn’t OK. By, like, the beginning of July … Pat kept getting jumpier, and more—not even like he was ignoring me and the kids, exactly; like he forgot we existed, because there was something huge on his mind. He talked about the noises in the attic a bunch more times, he even rigged up this old video baby monitor, but I still didn’t connect it up. I just thought … guys with gadgets, you know? I thought Pat was just finding ways to fill up all that spare time. By that stage I did know it wasn’t just being out of work that was getting to him, but … He was spending more and more time on the computer, or hanging around upstairs on his own when I had the kids downstairs. I was scared that he was addicted to some kind of weird porn, or having one of those online affairs, or like sexting someone on his phone?”

Jenny made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob, harsh and sore enough that it made me jump. “God, if only. Probably I should’ve copped on to the monitor thing, but … I don’t know. I had my own stuff on my mind, too.”

“The break-ins.”

An uncomfortable shift of her shoulders. “Yeah. Well, or whatever they were. They started around then—or I started noticing them, anyway. It made it hard to think straight. I was all the time looking for anything going missing, or anything moved, but if I actually spotted something, I worried that I was just being paranoid—and then I got worried that I was being paranoid about Pat, too …”