“She came for her allowance. It was poorly timed.”

Ivy sat at Sutton’s desk, opened the laptop, touched the trackpad. The screen saver disappeared and the password page came up.

Ivy stared at it for a moment, caught her lip in her teeth, then typed in a few letters and hit Return. The password dock shimmied but didn’t let them in. She tried again. Same result.

“Do it too many times and you’ll just lock us out. Doesn’t she keep it written down somewhere?”

Ivy tapped her finger on the return key. “Of course she does. It’s in her notebook, on the last page. I don’t see it here on her desk.”

“I didn’t know that. She keeps the old ones in the closet, in chronological order. Maybe it’s in one of them.” He pulled open the doors and went rummaging. It only took a moment to find the most recent notebook—Sutton’s organizational system put the local library’s Dewey decimal system to shame.

He flipped it open to the last page. Sure enough, there was the list, written in pencil.

He swallowed hard when he saw Sutton’s master password. He leaned over Ivy’s shoulder and typed it in. When he hit Return, the black screen fragmented away, and they were faced with Sutton’s home page.

“Open sesame. What was it?”

“The password? ‘I love Ethan Montclair.’” His voice broke, and pain bloomed in his chest, bright and hard. Would these be the last words he heard from his wife?

“How perfectly adorable.”

“Email first,” Ethan said gruffly.

Ivy hovered over the mail icon, clicked it. Ethan gestured, and Ivy stood, let him take over the chair.

The first five messages were all from this morning, from the weird sisters, from Jess. All asking if Sutton was all right. All after Ethan being in touch to see what they knew.

Then there was an array of the kinds of email Ethan himself received—used to receive—editors and publicists and marketing folk, all with terribly good news or don’t-worry-about-it news. Sutton had received a starred review from Publishers Weekly for her latest book that was due out in a month. Nice that she hadn’t mentioned that to him. A familiar seething anger started inside him, made up of equal parts jealousy, pride, and his own unique brand of self-loathing. His wife, the writer, was getting serious accolades for her bodice rippers, while Ethan, the author whose work actually mattered, whose literary contributions would be remembered, sat on his hands unable to write a fucking word.

And then there were the nasty-grams. His animus melted in the face of them. He hadn’t realized; she hadn’t told him. They were still coming in, no longer hundreds a day as they were in the beginning, but still too many. He counted twenty over the past week alone. She had them all saved to a folder, a filter labeling them. Hate mail from her previously loyal readers. He opened her sent folder. Nothing since Thursday. A chill paraded down his spine.