It would be so much easier to simply be dead. If she were dead, she wouldn’t have to finish the book. They would write nice things about her in the trades—Writer Gone Too Soon: The Inevitable Madness of an Artistic Life. There would be stories polished and reprinted about suicide and its impact on writers. Fifty or so writers would try to capitalize on her tragic death to talk about their own battles with depression, and oh, yes, please buy my book.

No. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

She felt light, suddenly. A beam of happiness drove through her. She always had this moment, with every book, when she felt that it would be easier to die than finish. It meant she was going to have the breakthrough that catapulted her to the end.

Sutton wasn’t entirely insane. She knew herself very, very well.

Smiling, she took the empty cup and saucer to the kitchen. Now she was in the mood to connect, in more ways than one. And Ethan never said no to a good lay.

In the kitchen, Ethan was sitting at the table, a book in front of him. A rush of emotion filled her. It was his battered copy of Stephen King’s On Writing, the one book he turned to in times of need. Signed by the author, no less. Of course it was.

He was struggling. That’s why the pages weren’t done. Ethan was struggling, and Sutton was doing everything she could to make his suffering worse. She blamed him. She blamed him for everything. She was a horrible person. Horrid. Evil to her very soul. Only an evil woman would let her husband suffer when she could alleviate the pain and despair with a touch.

Why are you still blaming him, Sutton? It was an accident. Worse, it was completely, utterly random.

But was it? Had he killed the baby to punish her?

Had she killed the baby to punish him? She’d been so drunk. The last thing she remembered was holding Dashiell, crying into his onesie, the soft fleece blanket wrapped around her shoulder, sheltering him. Had she smothered him unknowingly, then set him back in his crib facedown?

She dumped the teacup in the sink with a clatter and walked out of the room without saying a word, ignoring Ethan’s eyes boring into her back.

He had no idea how bad this was. Losing Dashiell was something unrecoverable; not knowing exactly how he’d died was life threatening.