Her dead husband, Hermann, lay asleep in her attic. On a bed of shredded pink fiberglass, fully dressed except for his feet, which were filthy, as though from walking.

She could not process this shock. She could not deal with it. The husband she had thought she was rid of. The tyrant. The batterer. The rapist.

She stood over his sleeping body, the machete a sword of Damocles, ready to fall if he offered the slightest move.

Then, by degrees, she lowered her arm, the machete blade coming to rest at her side. He was a ghost now, she realized. A man returned from the dead, a presence, meaning to haunt her forever. She would never be free of him.

As she was thinking this, Hermann opened his eyes.

The lids rose on his eyeballs, staring straight up.

Glory froze. She wanted to run and she wanted to scream and she could do neither.

Hermann’s head rotated until his staring eyes fixed on her. That same taunting look, as always. That sneer. The look that always preceded the bad things.

And then something clicked inside her head.

At that same moment, four houses down the street, three-year-old Lucy Needham stood in her driveway feeding a doll named Baby Dear from a snack-size bag of Cheez-Its. Lucy stopped munching the loud crackers, and instead listened to the muffled screams and hard, chopping thwacks coming from…somewhere nearby. She looked up at her own house, then north, her nose scrunched up toward her eyes in innocent confusion. She stood very still, an orange tongue of half-chewed, cheese-baked crackers sticking out of her open mouth, listening to some of the strangest noises she had ever heard. She was going to tell Daddy when he came back outside with the telephone, but by then her bag of Cheez-Its had spilled and she was squatting and eating them off the driveway, and after getting yelled at she forgot the whole thing.

Glory stood there gasping in her attic, retching, the machete gripped in both hands. Hermann lay in pieces among the sticky pink insulation, the attic wall splattered in dripping white.

White?

Glory trembled, soul sick. She surveyed the damage she had done. Twice, the blade had become lodged in the wood joist, and in her mind it was Hermann trying to wrench the machete away from her, and she’d had to rock it back and forth violently to get it free again and keep swinging at his flesh.

She backed away one step. She was experiencing an out-of-body sensation. It was shocking what she had done.

Hermann’s sneering head had rolled off between two joists, facedown now, a fluffy pinch of pink fiberglass stuck to his cheek like cotton candy. His torso was gouged and gored, his thighs sliced to the femur, his groin bubbling up white.

White?