We played in the hot park all afternoon and E managed to get a sunburn despite my attentions. Nell didn’t come. Perhaps she would never come back. Perhaps that man had killed her.

That night in bed with B it felt as if aphids were crawling under my skin. Beading there. My heart buzzed under the sheets like a hive, choked by veins, by blood fighting its way out of my chest. I couldn’t sleep. B was awake every hour, hungry, or too hot, or dreaming bad baby dreams.

It seemed that our two bodies were never not touching, would never not be. He was so hot in the hot apartment. I wanted to oil the floor in the guest room but he would not be put down, his small body burrowed next to mine. One moment he was like a soft-eared lion cub and the next he was like those blind maggots that seek out gangrenous wounds. I could never be sure in any minute which he would be, which I would. When he finally slept I slipped him into the crib and collapsed by the door of the guest room without opening it, without even raising my hand to the handle, and imagined that if I did open it, there would be a quiet ocean waiting inside with water salty enough to strip away everything that was unwanted from my skin.

I had begun to realize, or, really, to feel that there was something with me in the apartment. There was something that had slipped in somehow, through the locked door or through the window. The apartment was shifting I felt, turning, rolling over, opening up its arms, welcoming this thing that was not a person. Not M. This thing that was something slippery, something that smelled like dirt.

Maybe I was all wrong though, maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just my phone, lost somewhere, buzzing, keeping me half awake. Maybe M was calling me. Maybe he was calling me often.

It was so dark and so quiet. I could hear B breathing in his crib.

There was a change in the air inside the apartment. I felt it and then I felt that there was almost surely something in the apartment with me, slipping, keeping just in the corners of my eyes, one moment too light, like the shadow of a child, the next too heavy, a toad, a slimy thing burping out an underground musk. I became very still where I was on the floor pushed up against the door of the guest room. Would I get up? Would I run, now, right now when it was important? When it was important to my children? Would I save them? With this wrong thing sneaking in the dark? Surely I would.

I waited and waited. What I’m trying to tell you is that I waited such a long time to find out if I would, if I would save them I mean. I passed through the whole night like this, crouching, waiting, watching myself to see what I would do.