Iris doesn’t know what to say. She hears the creak of the step; Grant has left his eavesdropping post. “I didn’t kill her and neither did my husband. I appreciate your offer of help. But Grant will be just fine.”

“If you tell me this, I’m going to believe you,” Mike says, his voice breaking. “I’ll believe you. But you really have to say it to me.”

“We’re innocent,” she says. “We could never kill someone.”

Mike wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. She’s never seen him cry. “OK,” he says, gruff. “You deal with your lawyers tomorrow. Grant can stay at our house if he wants.”

“Go sleep if you can,” she says. She wants to give him a hug, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to touch anyone right now, except for her children.

Mike leaves. From the window she watches him walk down the street in the darkness, a pale, broad figure in the moonlight.

She goes to bed, alone, listening to the quiet. No sound from Julia’s room. No sound from Grant’s. And the other side of the bed is a new kind of empty.

55

Julia

They didn’t put Julia in the regular jail where her father was, as she was a minor, but instead they placed her in a juvenile detention center in South Austin, alone in her cell, wondering where her mother was, wondering what would happen next.

She had been seen. Her phone was by the body. The knife was from their house.

And Julia keeps thinking and saying: No, this is wrong. It’s wrong.

At some point after midnight she falls asleep, and for one awful, delicious moment when she wakes up, she thinks she is in her bed, snug at home, with her books and her photos of her friends acting goofy and the key Ned gave her tucked under her pillow where she’d put it so she’d feel close to him during this horrible time. But the light in the room is too bright, and she can hear sobbing and arguing from strange voices, nor far away.

This isn’t home. This is a nightmare.

She lies curled up on the bed, waiting for the tears to come, but trying to think now that sleep had wiped away the shock.

Marland is dead.

She thinks it through, because this is real and she has to deal with the reality, find the proof that she couldn’t have killed this man. Whoever killed him had killed him in a matter of moments—very quickly. Five stab wounds, she remembers seeing. Done quickly. Which meant…the murderer was in the house already when she and Marland arrived.

And Marland either knew and trusted that person, or Marland didn’t know he or she was in the house.