Sarah found herself opening the screen door, careful to avoid the screech and slam. She looked outside and found that Arman was standing down by the water, across from the flag. She thought about going down to get him, but remembered what he said about being raised in a house of yelling. “Arman,” she called out, “come back here.”

When he didn’t respond, she went back inside. Matthew was listening to Kiki, hushed and solemn. She was explaining the IVF, the insurance, and the debt.

“You did the right thing,” Sarah interrupted, sounding angry and impatient. “Stop beating yourself up about it.”

“You don’t understand,” Kiki muttered.

“We’re going to help you.” Sarah asked Matthew, “Right? All right?”

He nodded.

“So we’ll help you. You’ll figure it out. Just—please,” Sarah begged, then again, “please.”

“Please what?” Kiki asked. “What?”

Sarah thought of the tent in the woods; she thought of the man in the tent. He’d leaned her against a tree and she’d walked away unharmed. She’d courted danger and avoided it. It had made her feel better.

“Please stop wasting time.”

six

MONDAY

When Sarah was a child, her father gave her a password. She was to use it even if he knocked on their door and she asked Who is it? and it was her father saying It’s your father; she was to ask for the password with her half of the password, and if he didn’t respond with his half of the password, she was to never, not under any circumstance, let him in. Not even if they heard each other’s voice, he’d explained, were they to let each other in. When they traveled, he never allowed anyone to put their home address on their luggage tags, in case the baggage handlers saw the tags and decided to go rob their empty house. He didn’t believe in having food delivered, because what kind of person has a job delivering food? Do you want that person at your doorstep, getting a good look inside?

Whenever Sarah mentioned these … quirks, people inevitably asked, tentatively, if her mother had died by the hands of a criminal or if her father might have been a spy or involved in organized crime, and when Sarah responded that her mother hadn’t (congenital heart defect when Sarah was nineteen months old) and that he wasn’t (fluky and lucrative stint as the voice of Wrangler Denim, but a chemist, then a science teacher), all of these precautions seemed immediately and entirely crazy.