I said exactly none of this to my nervous middle child. Instead I smiled and brushed her hair back off her face. “Not long, honey. We’re being overcautious. Your dad and I had a terrible fright. But Robert is home and you are safe, okay?”

“Okay.” She didn’t sound convinced, but she followed her sister down the stairs.

As I closed the door to the basement behind them, I saw that my own hands had a shake in them. I’d never been a nervous person, but the last few days had ignited all the anxiety-prone recessives I’d passed to Peyton, courtesy of Mom. I hated being on a different floor from Robert, even with a bodyguard present. I hadn’t been away from my baby for more than a few minutes since Marshall had placed the perfect, angry miracle of him, kicking and squalling, back in my arms. His physical absence now left me shivery.

It was good to force this break, though. After all, he couldn’t sleep between me and his dad forever. By middle school it would be so awkward. His college dormmate would not know how to handle a ferocious mother, curled up like a guard dog at the foot of Robert’s bed. More immediately, keeping a baby in the bed between my husband and me every, every minute would soon start wedging our marriage apart.

I wanted to mend it. That had to start right now. I didn’t want anyone, even Robert, in the room for this conversation. I had such ugly things to say. I didn’t want his lovely clean slate of a brain absorbing them. And yet I felt that Trey and I would not be alone. The ghost of Lexie in her girlhood waited in our bedroom, hoping to be finally, truly seen.

Around seven the night-shift guys came to relieve Mills. I sent them down to the basement with the girls. Mills’s partner dropped Trey off at home fifteen minutes later, waiting in the car for Trey to get safely inside. I met my husband at the door, and my expression was enough to panic him.

“What?” he said. “Where are the kids?”

“The kids are fine. In the basement with the security team.”

“So what’s wrong? You look . . .”

I put a reassuring hand on his arm. “I needed some time to talk with you. Alone.” Trey remained on edge as I led him back to our bedroom. Perhaps he, too, felt the presence of Lexie’s younger self. That girl was buried inside a harder woman, lost to years of addiction and rough living, and yet she was here, too, caught and preserved on paper, in the middle of the moment that would change her life. I closed the door behind us. Locked it. “Sit down.”