More silence. Then she took a step toward him, her face aflame. “What? What did you just say?”

He held up his wineglass, smiling. “I knew you needed a little nudge toward getting pregnant. I knew you had doubts. I figured if it happened, great. And it did. Look what we made.” He gestured toward the baby. Dashiell was parked in his seat on the dining room table in his carrier, deeply asleep, a small mobile of butterflies hanging above him, barely disturbed by his breath. “He’s perfect!”

Sutton’s face went blank with shock.

“I wanted a child so badly, and I knew you did, as well. Deep down, you did. And it’s been so good for us. He’s been so good for us. Our marriage has never been stronger. You love him so much, and so do I. He’s made everything right between us.”

He was babbling now. She’d turned inward, wasn’t present anymore, not in this room, though her body was standing next to the stove, methodically stirring the contents of the wok.

He’d seen it happen when she was thinking hard about a book idea, assumed his face did the same thing when he came up with a line and turned it over and over in his brain. He stepped closer to force her mind back to him, to the present. To the truth.

“Darling, forgive me. I promised myself I’d never mention it, but clearly, that wasn’t the right thing to do. You have a right to know what I did. It was wrong. So wrong. But look at our son.”

The words were low, broken. “You bastard.”

“Please, please forgive me, Sutton. Because I want us to try again. I want to have another child.”

He tried to take her in his arms again, but she turned and fled, splashing him with vegetables and hot oil as she rushed away, into the garage. She slapped the button as she went out, and the door began to rise. The house door slammed, her car turned over. She peeled out of the garage and was gone before he’d made it to the door.

She didn’t come back for several hours. When she did, she was drunk.

And the next day, Dashiell was dead.

A Video Is Worth a Thousand Words

A VIDEO IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

Before she went to Jones’s place, Holly checked her email in the car, looking for the missing persons report Sergeant Moreno had promised. It was there, black and white: no signs of bank account use, Montclair’s passport and license unflagged at any port of call, email untouched, social media dark. Sutton Montclair had simply disappeared.

The lack of activity wasn’t good news. All they had to go on now were witness statements, which were already contradictory, and the internet, which was a cesspool of possibilities.