Something must show in her face, some expression, because he stands up quickly, shoving back the chair he was sitting in, and the other students, watching them already, notice.

“I don’t know, Ned. You just said you think someone else did this. Who?”

“Why are the cops talking to your dad?” he asks, in a louder voice, and she can see that other students have heard him now. But he doesn’t wait for an answer. He turns and runs from the cafeteria.

It’s the longest walk of her life, leaving her lunch table, the weight of a hundred stares on her back, and going to find someplace private where she can text her mother.

40

Iris

Kyle has gone with the police. Iris has called Kip Evander and asked him to go to the police station. It’s not an arrest. It’s a questioning. Just questions.

About secrets her husband has kept from her.

And her son. This is a house of secrets.

And if she’s going to save her family, she needs to know them all.

Iris was in Grant’s room when the police came, kneeling on the floor, looking at neatly bound stacks of cash hidden under the swimsuits he’s grown out of and she meant to donate to a resale shop. Where did this money come from? She could text him, but she doesn’t want to give him hours to formulate a lie. And she can’t bear to tell them, over the phone, that their father is being questioned by the police. Wait for them to get home from school.

And then here are the police, talking about a phone shared between Kyle and Danielle and an anonymous tip.

There was a phone and apparently Kyle destroyed it after Danielle was dead.

She finds it hard to believe they were having an affair. She believes she would know the signs. She knows Kyle. And she cannot imagine some odd passion arising between the two of them. It just does not seem likely.

But do we ever know someone? She shakes the thought away. She watches Kyle leave with the detectives and Gordon hurry over, asking questions, and then she sees Gordon walk back slowly to Danielle’s house after the cars are gone and just stand on the porch. Safest to assume he’ll assume the worst.

How long will it take the neighborhood to find this out? Someone other than Gordon will have seen Kyle in the police car, even if not in handcuffs. He was taken away, even if not under arrest. This neighborhood is living on the knife’s edge, and someone will talk. Someone will accuse him. And there was a time she would have worried about what that would do to her and the kids, but the brief flare of worry in her chest fades into a smoking ember.