And they talked about Coral, and Lexie, and Kelly Wilkerson, though the more honest of these conversations never happened when the children were around. Bree said to him, over and over, how much she wished she’d obeyed Coral one more time; Coral had told her to call Kelly. Bree believed she should have called Kelly right after her own envelope came. Coral had not explicitly told Bree that she was also sending Kelly a letter, but Bree felt she should have guessed that. And she’d known, they both had, how unstable and angry Kelly was.

Kelly’s envelope had arrived the day after Bree’s. When she saw the pictures, read the letter, she waited until her husband came home for lunch, and then she shot him five times. She put the gun inside a pillow to muffle the shots. While he bled out, she coolly showered, changed, made up her pretty face, and then reloaded.

Marshall believed that Kelly had not meant to survive long after Trey. She’d dressed herself beautifully, the way some suicides did, then looked up Trey on the Internet and driven straight to Atlanta to lie in wait for him in the parking garage outside his job.

In the spring, when she got melancholy, Bree would say, “If only I’d reached out to her. Coral said I should. Coral told me, when you get your letter . . .” A thousand times she fell silent, and then she’d sigh and tell him, “Trey should have apologized to her.” He wouldn’t know if she meant Kelly or Lexie or both. He thought that Kelly and Lexie sometimes became the same person in her head.

So it wasn’t like she stuffed it down. She talked about all that shit: Robert’s kidnapping, Spence’s death, Coral, everything. She’d discussed it endlessly with both Marshall and her therapist. She still did.

But the lamb thing. That? She only said it once.

It was St. Alban’s winter break, right at the end of February. In Georgia it already felt like spring. Bree hated it when the air turned warm each year. Hated the transition that reminded her the anniversary was coming. Every year it felt as if spring came a little earlier, making the warm march to the anniversary stretch out even longer. That was probably true, Marshall thought. The world cooking to death.

The third year she asked Marshall to take the week off, and he had agreed. The weather change shifted the moods of both Bree’s girls as well. They were weepier, more temperamental. They missed their dad more. They had a week off called “winter break,” for all the high was getting close to eighty. He decided that they all needed to opt out of the endless spring.