“Listen to me carefully,” I whispered. “Nate thinks you killed Santiago. He’s going to question you, maybe arrest you. Don’t say a word. He doesn’t have any evidence, just theories. I’ll fix this for us, but you just have to stay quiet.”

Ben had slumped back onto the gurney, eyes closed, as Cass arrived. He nodded, and I knew I’d bought myself a little time.

“What’s going to happen to Ben?” I asked Nate now.

He sat next to me. “Ben’s a person of interest in our case. Kia will question him and find out if he has any information once he’s stable. When he’s released, we’ll likely bring him in for more formal questioning.”

“You mean you’ll arrest him.”

“Only if he refuses to be questioned.”

“He didn’t kill that guy, Nate. He’s been in rehab.”

“I already told you, Em.” Nate’s shoulders tensed. “I’ll check. Just let me finish my investigation.”

Fury and helplessness overwhelmed me. My husband’s unimpeachable sense of right and wrong was something I’d loved when we first met. But now it felt like a trap. Good, I’d learned, meant different things to different people. I wanted to lie on the ground and scream and rail against the unfairness of it all.

I was a fool. I’d thought Ben could stay clean. I should’ve known addiction was indiscriminate and eternal. It invaded the homes of rich and poor, black and white, young and old. Its effects were far-reaching, its causes deep. And it never, never went fully away.

As a family, we’d never told people about Ben’s problem or talked about it with friends. It was a secret. Our family’s nasty little secret. The night my parents were killed, they’d been picking me up from a friend’s house when Dad’s cell phone rang. It was one of Ben’s friends calling to say they couldn’t wake Ben up.

As with so many other things, Ben was to blame for our parents’ deaths.

I shouldn’t have trusted him, and now people were dying. How high had he been when he’d been mixing the fentanyl with oxy? Too high to use the right measurements, that was for sure. Julia had overdosed today. Alice Jones had died. Had they both taken the pills he’d mixed? How many others were at risk?

I looked at Josh asleep on my lap. A rush of tenderness filled me as I watched his eyelids flutter in sleep. He was the biggest love of my life. Being his mother was what gave me meaning, what made everything in this whole crazy world make sense.