There was no suspicion in her voice. No malice, nor any disappointment that it was Graham who was gone and not Lauren. If Clarissa was curious about what happened—surely she had to be—she didn’t press Lauren for details, as Lauren worried she had done with Graham about her postpartum rage.

A story had been released that Graham had been arrested for breaking and entering and aggravated assault—and that he was Piper’s ex—and that he was the lead suspect in Piper’s attack, despite the fact that Graham was still vehemently denying having anything to do with it. What the public didn’t know, however, was the depth of Graham’s cruelty and how Lauren and Piper had both been victims.

Graham had been a suspect from the start—once the police got their ducks in a row and couldn’t get a confession out of Lauren or the others or even get any real answers, they started looking elsewhere. And then, Graham landed in their lap. They’d actually called Graham into the station earlier—the day after Piper’s attack, in fact, when Graham was supposedly at work. That day, they got out of Graham that their child died when he was a baby and that Graham had promised Piper not to expose her lie. It baffled the police why he’d do that; Graham simply said it was out of loyalty: She was my girlfriend, and that was my son.

The police told Lauren that he’d then said—and this was the part that turned Lauren’s stomach the most—“The person you really should be looking at is my wife. She’s violent. She’s capable of hurting someone.” Officer Allegra told her all this in a clinical tone, though when he got to this part and noticed the tears rolling down Lauren’s cheeks, he pushed a box of Kleenex across his desk. Had Graham ever loved her? Was he even capable of love? She thought of his face when Matthew was an infant—the joy, the wonder. He’d been hiding so many lies. It baffled her that a person could do such a thing.

There was something sticky about Graham, Allegra said. Something not quite right. The detective had followed up on Graham’s alibi—he’d told the police he was not at the Ketchup set, as he’d told Lauren, but in LA having a drink with a friend. But they couldn’t track that friend down; Graham was evasive about losing his number. Then, they started to drill into what exactly happened to his child who’d died. SIDS, is what the medical report said; maybe that was all it was. But it was strange that one child died and now there was a new wife with a violent personality . . . and an ex-girlfriend had been attacked. It didn’t add up.