Until it became Nora, digging through her purse as she stepped into the living room. She gasped in surprise when she saw them.

'Tommy,' she said, swallowing, drawing her hand down from her breastbone. Then, after a pause, she added, 'Agent Logan.'

'What are you doing, Nora?' Thomas asked.

There was a long, racing silence. This was bad, Thomas realized—catastrophic, even. Sam could lose her job.

She's going to fuck us, he thought. That was what Nora did. Even when their marriage was good, he used to joke that if she were a nuclear power, the world would have been destroyed at some point in her early twenties. Hand her a lash and she would find an out.

Nora laughed nervously. 'I'm here to pick up Ripley… So that we could show her Frankie together like we said…' She blinked, brought a finger to her fluttering left eye. 'Remember?'

He did remember—now. Ripley needed to visit her brother before any of her wilder imaginings could take hold. She had always been such a wonderfully skeptical brat, even before the divorce. Words would not be enough. They had thought that if they both brought her, they could cushion the shock somewhat. Even at the time, Thomas couldn't fathom precisely why he had thought it would help. Perhaps he had hoped the illusion of something mended—Mommy and Daddy together—could compensate for the reality of her broken brother.

'Tommy?' Nora asked.

'I'm sorry, Nora. I forgot all about it.' He cleared his throat. 'Rip's over at Mia's.'

'I see.' She looked directly at Sam. 'Too busy, I suppose.'

'It's not what you, think, Nora.'

Nora laughed in the caustic way that always made him ball his fists. 'Now that's a relief,' she said. 'Here I was thinking you'd left Ripley at Mia's so that you could bang the lovely agent here.'

Dead silence. Thomas glanced at Sam, thanked Christ she was staring at the floor.

'You have a choice here, Nora.'

'Don't I know it,' she snapped. 'I can't decide which to do first. Call Agent Atta and let her know that one of her underlings is fucking one of the victims' fathers.' She smiled with cheerful malice. 'Or spit in your face.'

The regret struck even before he opened his mouth. 'But that's what you always do, isn't it? Make things worse.'

Her hesitation told him he'd succeeded, struck bone, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do. Nora had more than her measure of secret self-undermining fears. In marriage you shared everything, even the keys to the gun cabinet.

'If that was true,' Nora said blankly, 'I would have told her'—she made a point of gazing directly at Sam—'how you fucked me just last week.'