His arm hung in the air for a few seconds. Then he shrugged, and withdrew.

“I should go,” he said as he stood.

“Yes.” The first words Therese spoke since he had entered the house. “You should.”

“Therese!” Leah put her hands on her hips. She seemed angry, but Therese didn’t care.

“You two have some talking to do.” He began to button up his shirt. Until that moment, Therese had not noticed it was even open.

Leah grabbed his hand. “No. You don’t have to go.”

He put his arm around her so that his hand rested on the small of her back. He pushed her into him, spreading her legs open with the curve of his knee. Then he nuzzled her neck and whispered something in her ear that made her laugh.

Therese turned her head. She had seen and felt it—the sparking—the moment he walked into the room. She felt overwhelmed by her situation, her emotion, and by the fact that she knew, without a doubt, that the day would come when she would watch Lionel die.

Therese tried to listen as Leah spoke. She was guarded at first, not forthcoming with many details, but the longer they sat together, the more comfortable Leah became. While Therese tried not to fold in on herself.

Leah talked about how she had never met such a talented painter and how sweet and kind he was and how his art moved her. After a while, it all blended together until finally Therese made an excuse for why she had to leave and stumbled out of the house drunkenly, though she’d consumed nothing but water.

She picked Matilda up from the babysitter, and even though she normally chattered like an angry bird, today she was quiet. All the better, because Therese needed time to think and clear her mind of what she had seen.

Anger pulsed through her fingertips, making her sweat and lose her grip on the steering wheel. She moved her head from side to side, trying to shake the intimacy of Leah’s laugh out of her mind. Even though she trusted her instincts, even though she knew it would be okay, her heart still pounded so loudly in her ears, she thought it might explode. She parked in the driveway just as Joan was pulling away with Aunt Olive beside her. Joan waved. Therese waved back, afraid that if she didn’t, Joan might stop to talk, and she couldn’t trust herself to speak. She opened the front door to discover an array of red plastic cups artfully arranged in a circle around a stack of mail. Her breath quickened as she lifted her arm and swept them off the table, sending them toppling to the ground like bowling pins.

“What’s going on in there?” Barbara yelled as she lifted herself from her spot on the couch.