“Yes.” I didn’t. It sounded bizarre, impossible. In the pause I heard Robert mutter and shift, and she drew a ragged breath. Was this the sickness that was killing her? Something respiratory? Or did her chest feel closed and tight from stress, like mine? I was seeking clues to her in every word and sigh, trapped in our terrible intimacy.

When she spoke next, her voice dropped. We were to it. The thing she wanted from me. “Before ten o’clock, you need to get at least three of those pills down Spencer Shaw’s throat.”

She’d taken Robert because I was close with Spence. Well, Trey was. Or partnered with him anyway. I smoothed a caffeinated cream over my eyelids to take down the swelling, feeling an irrational surge of rage at my husband.

How many times had I watched Trey rub his forehead, rueful, over some mess of Spence’s? And yet he kept on working with him. Spence landed clients, but Trey did most of the work that kept them. Spence was better at cocktail parties than contracts, and he was also willing to break rules that Trey would not so much as bend. Spence stayed within the lines of the law, Trey had assured me, but I got the feeling it was sometimes only barely. And now this was happening. I set the cream back in the drawer, then turned to check on Robert.

In the space of half a breath, I’d forgotten he was gone. It almost undid me. I froze, fighting back a wave of tears and panic. I’d read about something like this happening to people who had lost a limb. They would reach out with a hand that wasn’t there or feel cramping in a foot they no longer owned.

I stood abruptly, turning to the built-in drawers behind me. I kept my jewelry in the top two. I opened the lower one, which held costume jewelry and some older pieces. The bracelet I wanted, a chunky gold thing meant to be worn above the elbow, was all the way in the back. It felt too young for me now, and ever since I’d had the girls, it was a little tight. I wanted that, though. The bite of that cold metal in my flesh.

I pushed it up my arm until it pinched, then nodded, calmer. I could not forget myself again. I could not keep reaching for him. It would break me down, and I would fail.