She gets out of the car, the early summer air moist on her skin, and retrieves Lolly from below the passenger seat, where she must have rolled. But even when Suzy has Lolly back in her arms, she’s still wailing. Annie digs around for the rarely used pacifier, but even that is spit out with such force that it lands somewhere beneath the dashboard.

For the first time in the year she’s been with Suzy, Annie has the urge to cover that little mouth, force the black smoke of her screams back into her lungs. Annie holds her head in her hands and rocks on the grassy verge on the side of the road, watching the cars go whizzing by, their motors drowned out by Suzy.

Annie undoes the straps of the car seat and brings Suzy to her chest, bounces her, cradles her, sings to her. But nothing, no caress or soft sound, can quell the absolute anguish that’s escaping Suzy. Annie sets Suzy on the ground then, on the grassy terrain bordering the highway, and lies down herself, her arms tight around Suzy’s waist, her ear to the earth, waiting for the howling to end.

Back at the Keller house, Claudette shuffles her way through the back door. She realized, in a whir of anxiety, that she’d left at the Kellers the brand new negligee she’d bought. The fancier shops were closer to the Kellers’ house, so she’d popped in on the way to work on Wednesday and stashed the shopping bag in the laundry room cupboard, so her sister wouldn’t find it in the car.

This was date night with her new boyfriend, Russ Coddinger. Really, he was an old boyfriend, a high school crush who had just gone through a divorce. She’d promised him an unbelievable Friday evening, and she couldn’t bear to see the disappointment around his majestic jawline when he noticed her in the same sad bra and panties she’d worn last week. She had the extra key to the Kellers’, so why not go grab the package? Mr. Keller wasn’t even home that weekend. It would just be the girls.

But Anneliese’s car is gone, the house dark when Claudette enters the kitchen. She flips on the light and goes to the laundry room to grab the bag. She lets out a small sigh of relief; the fuchsia gossamer nightie is still there, wrapped in tissue, and she’s glad she won’t have to make small talk with Annie. All she wants to do is start getting dressed, lose herself in fantasies of the night to come.