“Almost finished,” Roy said without looking up. He’d been typing like a madman ever since the table tennis. He’d come to love Isabel’s Russian family so much he’d decided to pare down the assassin nonsense and amp up the amusement of sneaking her family members onto Mars. He’d also thrown in a lot of pregnant table tennis. There were some sad bits too. Now he was working on one of his trademark optimistic endings.

“Where’s Shy? Oh, of course, she’s at a match,” Wendy said, answering her own question. She really did need a bath. The essence of serial killer was all over her. She poured herself a second glass of wine, wishing Roy would get out of his chair and embrace her and make her sit down and put her feet up and tell him all about her near-death experience while he fixed her a Kir Royale and Camembert and crackers.

“Done,” Roy announced, triumphantly hitting a final key and closing his laptop. “I might need to tinker with it and add a brilliant last line and pad it out quite a bit, but it’s mostly there. I’d like to give it to you to read. See what you think.”

“I almost died,” Wendy repeated. She tossed aside her phone and gulped her wine. She didn’t want to read the rough draft of Roy’s new book. In fact, that was the last thing she wanted to do. He always said he threw out about 75 percent of his first drafts because they were completely inane. He could show it to his school nurse friend, his reader, the one all the men in the neighborhood seemed to lust after. Or his skinny, nervous, suit-and-tie-wearing friend who couldn’t handle his liquor. Or his friend’s crazy artist wife. Or his twenty-eight-year-old agent, for Christ’s sake—that was her job.

For the first time Roy noticed that his wife looked particularly harried and even a bit drunk.

“Was the traffic awful? I thought it might be on a Friday. I can unload the U-Haul and return it to the garage if you’d like to have a bath,” he said gently.

Wendy stared at him. What was the point?

The front door clicked and Shy flounced into the house. She ran the kitchen tap and drank straight from the stream.

“I won at table tennis.” She slurped some more water. “I’m starving. What are we having for dinner?”

“I went to watch for a bit. She’s quite good,” Roy shouted from the other room.