“I’m sorry,” I said. I knelt by him and began putting his spilled groceries back into the bags.

“Who are you?” he asked, touching his cheek, pushing his glasses up onto his nose. I could see a ring of fine stubble, shining silver on the sides of his shaved head. He was so much older and smaller than he’d looked on Facebook. He was pitiful and bleeding and sitting in eggs. I felt such sorrow for him. Even if he had done something with Spence or Trey, Geoff’s death was a hideous injustice. The mother and her daughter had invented this hell, for all of us. Nothing on earth justified what was happening to Robert either. Nothing. Our little boys were innocent.

It had taken this broken girl literally tearing her husband open to make me see it. In the ruin of Kelly, I saw all the things I did not want to be. Tonight my husband, the man I loved, the father of my children, would be home. I wasn’t going to burn him up alive, no matter what his part in this. I couldn’t blame Trey for what the mother had chosen. I felt myself rewrapping, all the way, around my husband. No conditions, no requirements, and no limits. Me, then him, and then our girls and Robert, whom we must bring back into the safety of the middle. Our bull’s-eye.

“I’m Bree,” I told him, tucking three unbroken eggs back into their carton. “The man with your wife is Marshall, a private detective investigating a case similar to yours. He needs to ask you some questions.”

I helped him stand, though I wasn’t sure he’d understood half of what I’d told him. He seemed bewildered. I carried his grocery bags through and dumped them on the filthy kitchen counter. Kelly was sprawled on the sofa, face blotchy from weeping. Marshall sat up straighter as we entered, but she only glared. Her adrenaline was spent, and gin and Ativan were hard at work in her.

I went to her and took her by the shoulders. I told my new and bedrock truth to her, as she trembled, icy, in my arms. “Nothing your husband did, no matter what, deserves this. That old woman is the one who took them. She took two little boys who never did a damn thing wrong. It’s all on her.”

Her eyes shuddered closed, and she collapsed back against the sofa. Her husband hovered in the doorway, anxious, his pants wet with egg, slow blood in little trickles drying already on his cheek.

“Is she all right?” he asked.

“She took two Ativan and drank two shots of gin since we arrived. I think she had something else before we got here. We should keep an eye on her,” I told him.