I finished the coffee, felt the tingling buzz as the caffeine perked me up. I unplugged the toaster and the coffeemaker, made sure Grendel had plenty of water. I’d see Lance on campus and could talk to him then. If I waited to leave, I’d miss out on prime parking. Whatever Lance wanted could wait.

“You keep an eye on the place,” I said. “I’m going to be better from now on. The other night was a low point.”

Grendel kept on eating. But he flapped his tail.

I took it as affirmation of the decision to turn my life around.

The front bell rang. Grendel barked three times in a row, food falling out of his mouth and onto the linoleum. I almost ignored the ringing and went out the back. I’d be late for class, and showing up late was no way to turn the page to the next chapter in my life. And for a change, I was eager to get to campus. I wanted to talk to Madeline, wanted to talk to her about the thesis. Hell, I wanted to pick her brain, writer to writer, and find out how the hell she had tapped into whatever current of inspiration she’d found and churned out that book.

Where had it come from?

But the ringing came again. Insistent. And nobody ever rang the bell.

“Shit,” I said.

Grendel barked again but stayed at the food bowl, eating away.

I dashed to the front of the house. “All right, all right.”

I expected someone selling something. Or the meter reader.

When I opened the door and saw a woman in a suit with a uniformed cop by her side, my mind flashed back to a place it didn’t want to go.

Three years earlier, on that very stoop. Two cops and a social worker, knocking on the door. I knew. As soon as I saw them, I knew something was horribly wrong. And everything flashed before my eyes—our wedding day, Jake’s birth, moving into the house in Gatewood just a ten-minute walk from campus.

And that spring morning, when a cop was there again, I knew. I tried to convince myself it was something simple. A misunderstanding. A parking ticket.

But it wasn’t right.

None of it was right.

“Connor Nye?” the woman in the suit said.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

There was an advantage to not being that close to anybody. Except Grendel. The cop couldn’t come to the door and tell me anyone else near and dear to me had died. There were no more bombshells to drop. No more family members to pick off. I tried to find comfort in that, but the thought only depressed me, dampened the good feelings I’d woken up with.