“I want to wait until nine at least,” I told Gabrielle. “It’s rude to call anyone before that.”

I almost laughed when I heard myself say it. It was so surreal. As if the woman who’d stolen my baby and tricked me into killing Spence would be sitting by her phone, waiting out the clock for the sake of social mores.

A sound came from the coffee table, widening our eyes, stopping our breaths: the buzz of a phone against the antique brass.

I was up off the sofa, reaching, before I realized it was my own. I could see my husband’s handsome face smiling up at me from the lit screen.

“Trey,” I told them.

Marshall blew his breath out, his eyes on me kind and sorrowful, and in his gaze I understood that this was the end of it. The night was truly over, for all the storm was keeping us in darkness. She would not be calling.

I lifted the phone with shaking hands. Once I told my husband, it was real. Not just for me. For the girls. They would never trust anything again with the kind of innocence that they had now. It would change Trey, too, and our marriage. It would wreck my mom and leave Trey’s family reeling as well. I couldn’t see the world very clearly past this moment, but I saw enough to know it wasn’t a place where I wanted to live.

My free hand, of its own volition, pressed the red circle that sent Trey to voice mail.

I was not ready to give up. “She could still call. It’s still morning.” Until noon I would leave the world intact for the people I loved most.

Gabrielle’s voice was gentle. “You have to talk to your husband. He must know about Spence by now. My work-group texts are blowing up. If he doesn’t hear from you, he’ll call friends or family to come check on you.”

She was right. God, if he called Mom! She would panic. She would come straight over and bring the girls. Here, to this house, where the world was as frightening as she had always believed. I didn’t want the girls in this place, where life was dangerous and terrible and we were sheep, sweet and dumb, ready to be preyed on by monsters like the woman who’d taken Robert, or like my father. He was the one who’d made my mom see the world this way.

She’d started dating him when she was fourteen and he was twenty. When she was sixteen, she dropped out of school and they got married, left the state. She stayed with him, too, right up until she realized she was pregnant.