Maybe she wouldn’t have to. Rod never came into the kitchen if he could help it. A few hours with some plaster would take care of the holes in the walls and ceiling, and he probably wouldn’t notice the dents in the fridge even if he did come in.

She set to work, frantically pulling bits of metal out of the walls, scrubbing red sauce—like blood—off the walls, the ceiling, the floor—trying to remember if she had told Rod what supper would be—

She had. Hell. Well, he would just have to put up with a different kind of sauce. She could say it was an experiment. She snatched tomato sauce and spices out of the cabinet, threw them at random into a pot. If it came out tasting funny, she could bury it in cheese.

But the Indian—she had to be going crazy. No amount of scrubbing would wipe him out of her mind. Standing there, between the table and the fridge, long hair trailing down his back, staring at her. Hating her. Telling her so, with his eyes.

And then vanishing, just like a soap bubble.

She was going crazy. She had to be.

She stopped dead at that thought, hands frozen on her scrubbing pads, hair trailing into her face.

If she was crazy, could Rod be right? Could she be doing these things herself? Could she have put the scorpion in the sandbox, stripped the insulation from the wires in the dryer, turned the heat up under the pressure cooker?

Was she trying to kill her own children?

She started crying at that, silently so as not to alert the children. Mechanically, she went back to scrubbing, tears falling to mingle with the soapy water. If she was doing all this—

She didn’t remember doing anything!

But—people with multiple personalities didn’t remember what their other “selves” did, either. Sybil, Trudi Chase, Eve … they had no idea what their other selves did. And they never noticed missing time, either, the places in their lives where the other personalities took over.

But then a single ray of hope came to her. The woman who had almost hit Ryan—she had seen the Indian too! What was more, even if this “Indian” was a personality of her own, she couldn’t possibly have gotten into a costume, down the street, pushed Ryan in front of the car, then sprinted back to her kitchen and shed the costume before Ryan and the stranger arrived there.

She sniffed, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She had to keep cleaning. No matter what, she had to keep cleaning. Cleaning up this mess, that was real reality. She could cope with this, even if the rest of her life was falling apart.

Even if it was the only thing left in her life that she could cope with.