It was horrifying. A thick cloud smelling of rotting flesh nearly knocked us over as soon as the lid was opened. I gagged and had to run away, taking deep breaths as I sprinted across the lawn. Mark did throw up, into an old painter’s bucket in our garage.

It was a decomposing raccoon, covered in maggots and flies, with black sludge all around it, at the bottom of the freezer. We had no idea how it got inside or how long it had been there, but that was the epicenter of the stench: rotting, decaying flesh and maggots.

And as I sat on my front porch, the putrid cloud emanating from Liz’s backyard, that’s exactly what I was smelling.

CHAPTER
3

Rocky danced in front of me, a stutter step followed by a 360-degree turn, three times. I stared at him, waiting for Mark to offer to take him for a walk after dinner. I had made fettuccine Alfredo and garlic bread, which Jack announced was disgusting, and Emily drew a line in the proverbial sand and said that she would only eat the garlic bread. I always found it exasperating that I was the least picky person in the house, so I was relegated to making meals that were kid-friendly, and they still wouldn’t eat them.

Emily and Jack were in the basement, engaging in what sounded like a dangerous battle with the lightsabers my parents had erroneously bought them for Christmas, and Mark was bent over his phone, staring at work emails.

He glanced up. “I have to go to Miami at the end of next week.” He frowned. “Sorry.”

I nodded mutely. Mark had been traveling more and more for work and was usually gone for at least a couple of days every month. At first, I had panicked, but after a while, I barely reacted. It was usually last minute, so I quickly learned to shuffle things around as needed, whether it was dance carpool or a girls’ night out. More than once, we’d had to reschedule our neighborhood ladies’ night to accommodate his schedule when I couldn’t find a babysitter.

I looked down at Rocky. “Give me fifteen minutes, then we’ll go out, I promise.” Of course, the only word he understood was “out,” so he started hopping up and down. He was three years old, a pug mix that we had found at a rescue the year before. The kids had begged for a puppy, but I didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night, so we settled on an adult dog. From the moment I saw his little squished face behind the kennel door, I was in love. He had some breathing problems, so he snored, but I didn’t mind. His snoring lulled me to sleep each night like he was a living white-noise machine.