“Would you like a cup of tea or coffee or something?” she asked him as she led the way through the house to the kitchen.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Mendez said, taking in the surroundings: cream-painted cupboards and a hand-painted border of grapes dripping from vines around the ceiling. Her handiwork, he imagined. Down along a right-angled crease where a cabinet met a wall, she had painted a bright-eyed mouse peeking out of a hole in the baseboard—so realistic he almost startled when he first saw it.

“Please, call me Sara,” she said as she filled a mug with water and stuck it in the microwave oven that seemed to take up half the counter. “I’ll feel less embarrassed about having a nervous breakdown in front of you.”

“Sara, then,” he said, thinking it maybe wasn’t such a good idea to blur that line. “Do you have any family nearby?”

“I’m from the Seattle area. My parents are there. And my sister.”

“Are you close?”

“We used to be,” she said. She hit the Cancel button on the microwave before the timer could go off. “She’s got a family and a career. She’s busy. I’m busy.”

“You know, it’s none of my business—what’s going on in your marriage—but it just seems to me you shouldn’t try to go through it alone,” he said, then felt like an ass. “I should have stopped at ‘It’s none of my business.’”

She shook her head and dunked her teabag—something herbal by the scent of it—into the mug of water as she took a seat at the breakfast bar. “It’s okay. I’m sure I would say the same thing if I was watching from the outside. From the inside ... it’s not so simple.”

“I’m sure it’s not.”

“I come from a perfect family,” she said. “I’m supposed to have a perfect family. I thought I did. What did I do wrong?”

Mendez felt a rush of anger. “You didn’t—”

“You don’t know that.” She smiled at him as if he were a sweet but dimwitted boy. “Nothing happens in a vacuum.”

He wanted to say at least ten derogatory things about her husband, but he bit his tongue.

“Maybe I’m too insecure,” she said. “Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe—”

“Maybe your husband is a son of a bitch.”

So much for his self-control.

“That too,” she said, and took a careful sip of her tea. “It’s hard on Wendy. I feel guilty for that. I’m the mom. I’m supposed to make her life ideal and shelter her from life’s unpleasant side. Instead, her father and I are wallowing there.”

“Then you need to change that.”

“I know,” she admitted. “It’s scary.”

“Do you think he’ll make it hard for you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I hope not.”