She brings back a thick manila folder stuffed with papers. She flips it open on the table and starts paging through, turning the documents over with crisp efficiency.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at, Detective.” But even as I say it, I should have known it was coming. Madeline. Sophia. The book. Except I know Madeline is alive. And I don’t know Sophia at all.

Do I?

I run my mind back through the trips to the dog park. Admittedly I wasn’t in the most social frame of mind back then. Yes, I talked to the other dog owners, made small talk about the weather, politics, the university. The dogs.

But I rarely learned names. Never made lasting connections. No one invited me out for a drink or a coffee or a meal. I’m sure I seemed closed off, shut down. And if I gave my name, people might have even recognized it. They might have known or heard about what happened to Emily and Jake, and then I’d no longer be the quiet guy at the dog park. I’d be the “poor man whose family died.” I’d be set off by quotation marks, an object of curiosity and sympathy and even a little fear. After all, what do you say to a guy who lost his wife and son to the ocean? A guy who mopes around with his only companion, a wheezing, arthritic beagle-husky mix?

But there is something else.

There is the blue house that must have been on Iroquois. The blue house with the perfect lawn and the perfect yard. And the perfect couple inside . . .

There was something about them. . . .

“Here it is,” Bowman says, poking the paper with force. “We interviewed Sophia Greenfield’s husband, Zachary, quite extensively. He was the person who could really be Sophia’s voice after she was gone. And do you know what he told us?” She taps the paper again. “He told us Sophia was nervous. Scared even. She said there was a guy who used to walk his dog on their street in the evening, and do you know what that guy used to do?”

The perfect blue house. The perfect yard.

The blond woman. The dark-haired man with the neatly trimmed beard.

And I would see them working in the yard, the two of them, laughing together. Or through the windows of the house. Watching TV as I walked by. Having a drink on the porch.

“She said he used to . . . watch them,” I say.

“She told her husband she thought the man with the dog was behaving strangely,” Bowman says. “Creeping around. Watching them. Watching her. And after she died, we all tried to find that man, but we couldn’t.” Bowman looks pleased. She smiles. “Spoiler alert, Connor. I think I just found him.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CONNOR

SUMMER, TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO

I’ve always looked inside other people’s windows.