“I need a shower. I need to wash this conversation off me. Then I’m going down to watch movies with the girls and hold my son. I’m sleeping in Robert’s room tonight, on the daybed, so you can get some rest. Take one of my Ambien. You’ve been sitting up all night every night since Sunday. You’re a wreck. That must be where this is coming from.” He paused, as if waiting for an answer. I didn’t have one for him. Not one he would hear right now. He swallowed and nodded, as if my silence were confirmation. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? Because if I let you keep on tonight, you’ll break us. I don’t want that. We have three kids. We love each other. I’m not going to let you break us. We will not put our girls through the ugliest divorce this city has ever seen. Think about it, Bree. You don’t want to publicly accuse their father of being a rapist. You know what that will do to them. You’ll tear us apart and make them hate you, and for what? An imaginary story you made up from a photo. You know me. And I know you. I honestly think you only need to get some sleep. Real sleep. It will all look different. We’ve had the most hellish week any parents could ever live through. Let’s not make things worse.”

He went into the bathroom, closing the door deliberately and gently behind him. I heard the lock turn, and then I heard the water running. I knelt down, weeping, and started picking up the pieces of the pictures. He was wrong to worry about the girls finding them. The photographs were shreds and specks. Some things were too broken and too torn to ever again be mended.

26

I didn’t take the Ambien. I’d never tried it before, and I was afraid. Not because of the black label warnings about sleepwalking and memory loss. I was afraid that if the flesh-and-blood Lexie Pine came for us, her will as implacable as her mother’s, her anger more direct and righteous, I would not wake up.

Trey would not make peace with her. Trey refused to be sorry, and I was irrationally fearful that she had somehow heard him say all those awful things, same as I had. In my mind her fury honed itself against his words and his willful denial, sharpening.

I lay all night in our king-size bed, alone. I’d never realized how wide it was, the white expanse of sheets going on seemingly forever. I stared out the window, the drapes pulled open and the backyard floodlights on, listening through the baby monitor to Trey and Robert breathing. I slept in snatches, my mind too busy and worried and unhappy to let me rest.