She shrugged. “No. He’s a lawyer.” I felt a little flame light up in my very center. She was still talking, though the gin and pills had put a ramble in her voice. “They prefer people in the actual professions at the school. That’s their big thing. Learn from real pros, not academics who—” Her voice cut out abruptly. Her drugged gaze sharpened, and she sat up straight. “Those other men you showed me, in the suits. They look like lawyers. Are they lawyers? You think that Adam knows them?”

“That’s not the angle I’m pursuing,” Marshall lied.

Of course he was thinking it. We both were. Adam had another house, and three more kids, and alimony, and still he’d bought her this place. Not possible on a professor’s salary. His income must be bolstered, perhaps in illegal ways.

“You do!” She glared back and forth between us. “You think Adam knows them!” She got up, agitated, pacing away to the counter. She turned back to us, and when she spoke, it was the calmest, clearest thing she’d said so far. “If he made this happen, I will burn him up alive.”

“No,” I said, though Adam might well have been working with Spencer Shaw. And perhaps with Trey.

Her eyes were flat glass, no humanity in them. “I’ll burn him up alive.”

That was when we heard the front door opening. Adam was home.

She moved so fast. She was out of the room before Marshall or I was even standing. As she sprinted out of sight, a wail came from her mouth, inhuman, like a siren. Marshall took off after her, me running in his wake.

Ahead we heard a thud, then a crash. A man was grunting and yelling, “Jesus, Kelly, what the—”

I came into the foyer in time to see Marshall peel her writhing, shrieking body off her husband. Adam Wilkerson sat flat on his bottom in a heap of plastic grocery bags, one cheek bleeding from three long, parallel scratches.

Kelly flailed in Marshall’s arms, still screaming. Her husband’s mouth gaped open, and his glasses were askew. Eggs had fallen out and broken right beside him, leaching under one pant leg, so that it looked as if he’d been trying to hatch them when he was attacked.

“What did you do?” his wife shrieked, slapping at Marshall. Marshall simply carried her out of the room, back through the doorway, as if she were a child. As they disappeared, she yelled again, “What did you do?”

The very question I was desperate to ask Trey.

I stared at the sad little man, his dismayed mouth, the blue-black circles under his eyes. I didn’t know if he’d really been at his ex-wife’s house or only at the grocery store, but I recognized a person being eaten up by grief.