The day Leslie went missing, I knew as soon as I walked in the house that something was wrong. Not just amiss, but wrong, badly wrong. There was no reason for me to feel that way. I told myself I was just on edge because of the tension with Leslie.

I had escaped the house that afternoon to go to a job site. Judith Ivory was redecorating her beach house. To spend a few hours trying to argue Judith away from her own bad taste had seemed far preferable to staying home and dealing with my oldest daughter’s bad humor.

I knew Leslie well. I knew she would spend the day pouting in her room, coming out to inflict her sour mood on the rest of us at lunchtime and snack time. By dinnertime she would start to soften. By bedtime she would be contrite—if not the first day of being grounded, certainly by the end of the second. Then she would begin her clever, insidious campaign to wiggle her way back into the good graces of her father and me.

It wouldn’t go so easily this time, I knew. Leslie was making a stand for her independence, and Lance was making a stand for his absolute authority. A clash of the Titans. Life in the Lawton house was going to be a prickly affair for a few days.

I felt the worst for Leah, my sweet sensitive one. My peacekeeper. She had done nothing wrong, but was as much of a prisoner as her guilty sister. We would not be going out as a family again any time soon. And Leah would restrict herself from going out with her friends in an attempt not to rub Leslie’s nose in the consequences of her own wrongdoing—a courtesy Leslie did not deserve and would probably not have returned if the situation was reversed.

I felt the worst for Leah, and yet I had taken the chance to flee the hostilities, leaving her to deal with her sister alone. I felt some guilt for that, but I also knew the tension would be much less without me there, and that Leslie would soften to Leah long before she softened toward Lance or me.

I expected them to both be in the family room when I got home, watching a movie or playing video games, or out by the pool sunning themselves and reading fashion magazines. Life in the Lawton Correctional Facility was pretty cushy.

But when I walked into the kitchen through the laundry room door, laden down with fabric samples and wallpaper books, I stopped dead. The house was silent, and a sensation of dread went down my back like a cold, bony finger.