Lexie was a broad-spectrum anxiety, a darkness stretched so wide on my horizon that I could not see how my family would ever find our way through to normal. I wanted her arrested for her part in Geoff’s death, but she knew I’d given Spence her mother’s poison. I truly believed that Coral was his murderer, but I couldn’t deny that I’d been her instrument. I had obeyed her every command. If Lexie were found, she would tell the police. Everyone would know. My children, my mother, all our friends and Trey’s colleagues. I might go to prison.

Having her loose in the world was worse, though. On Monday the story hit the news, so Lexie must now know that her mother’s plan was incomplete. In the darkest hours of the night, I wondered if Coral were also watching. Did she know she’d failed? Did her daughter feel her distant rage like arrows, slivering through space and time to find her heart?

As of Wednesday morning, the story had stayed local. Nothing national. A political sex scandal and the murder contract a Buckhead housewife had put out on her cheating husband had more traction. Or so Trey told me. I couldn’t bear to watch any of it.

The early reports were calling it a thwarted kidnapping, with no mention of revenge or Lexie or even the Wilkerson family. The press had not made those connections yet, though they still might, when Lexie was caught, or when Geoff’s body was found, or when the police released the information that Coral Lee Pine was also implicated in the murder of Spencer Shaw.

They knew that because I’d told them so myself.

That day, in the wake of the explosion, I huddled on the smoky hillside with Marshall, my son cradled so close. In that moment I could not believe that Coral was truly dead. Back at the carousel, I’d seen her drink, seen her drop to her knees, seen her face mottle and flush, just like Spencer’s at the party. But I had not seen her die. I kept thinking, She was still alive when I left her, even as Trey found a way up the hill to us, red-faced and panting.

He fell to his knees beside me, saying, “Thank God, thank God,” and running his hands over Robert’s soft, bald head, then down his spine, then feeling every limb, just as I had.