“I wonder if anyone’s security camera picked her up walking by their house,” Iris says. “Or anyone else walking to the park.”

He doesn’t answer that. “The police won’t tell us that. And she could have walked up there via the greenbelt.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” Iris asks, very softly. She touches his bruised face. “It’s OK. You can tell me anything. You know that.”

He stares at her for so long she thinks the worst. Then he says, “No, there is not. Is there anything you want to tell me?”

“No.” She slides under the sheets, closes the laptop. She kisses her husband’s forehead, touches his swollen lip with her finger, and then returns to her own pillow. She closes her eyes and he closes his.

She listens to the silence in the darkness and her own breathing and presses a fist against her mouth as she watches the shape of her husband in the bed, wondering what he’s thinking.

Wondering what he’s done.

12

Grant

Midnight.

Grant has set his email on his laptop and phone to ping if something arrives. When he hears the soft noise he’s half-asleep, but he sits up in the darkness.

It’s from the obscurely named Gmail account. From the Sender—this is how he thinks of this person now, with a name tied to activity.

He opens it.

There’s another picture this time, but included in the email, not a link to another website. A small house bundled in snow. The house is wooden, painted a soft green that seems almost hopeful for spring against the white of winter. He doesn’t know this house. There’s a cat sitting in the window—a small black cat—and he doesn’t know the cat, either.

There’s a message from the Sender below the picture.

Lies can surround a home and bury it in coldness. Be the cat, looking out the window. And look again in your tree.

A reference to lies again. Lies in rain, lies in snow. What does this mean? He searches Google Images again (“green house in snow”), but he doesn’t see the exact same picture in the results. Maybe this isn’t a stock photo.

He writes back: I don’t want any more emails from you.

The response is nearly instant: It’s hard to hear the truth for the first time in your life.

Grant stares at the words. Who is telling me lies?

Your family. They’ve lied to you for so long. Especially today. The money shows I’m serious. This isn’t a prank. This is your life.

Grant writes: Stop emailing me.

The Sender’s answer: if I stop talking to you then I might have to start talking to the police about what your daddy did. The bad, bad thing he did.