And now she’s here, in our house. Standing in the foyer. If she comes in any farther, and she will, which way will she go? Left, into the kitchen and the television room beyond? Or right for the stairs—in full view of us, standing just inside the bedroom doorway.

And speaking of bedrooms, it feels strange to be standing shoulder to shoulder with a masked man in mine. The space is too personal and far too intimate. Everywhere I look are pieces of me and Cam. The framed photos of the kids, naked but for their diapers, on the wall. The romance novels piled up on a nightstand strewn with discarded earrings and Chapstick and lotion bottles. The neat pile of freshly laundered sports bras on the bed, which I wish to God were tucked in a drawer. I don’t want to be here with him. It’s too disturbing, like some kind of BDSM nightmare.

On the other side of the wall, Tanya’s footsteps go dull and blunted, which means she’s moved from the foyer marble onto the living room hardwood.

Please go left please go left.

Turning right would get us killed. Me, Baxter, Tanya. Three unarmed innocents. Turning right would involve her in this nightmare, too.

And then something else occurs to me. What if she’s here because she saw Beatrix make her escape? What if she saw her...I don’t know, shimmy down a drainpipe, race down the hill, sneak through the bushes to the neighbors’? If anybody saw Beatrix make a run for it, it would have been Tanya. What if that’s what she’s coming here to tell me?

Tanya’s footsteps are clomping around, moving nearer. “Where are y’all? Are you upstairs?”

“Get rid of her,” the man whispers, and now he sounds like Cam. Cam has never been a Tanya fan. Not since the welcome-to-the-neighborhood party she threw us, where after one too many cocktails, I offered her a key. Cam wanted me to march over there and demand it back, because he knew she’d equate the key with an open-door policy. She uses it at least once a week to pop over for drinks, to deliver our mail or just to say hi. She’s sweet, but she needs constant coddling, like an insecure, jealous spouse. She wants nothing more than to be needed.

And now that’s one battle won because boy do I ever need her.

I scurry down the hall with Baxter on my hip, my shoes slipping in the broken glass, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. I spot Tanya in the living room, pinching a fuchsia-tipped bloom of an orchid plant between two fingers, I’m guessing to see if it’s real.

“Sorry, sorry. We were in the bedroom. Hey, Tan.”