The question popped into his head, and he asked it before he fully realized how morbid it was.

“What would I have to do to make you want to kill me?”

“God, Colin.”

“I mean it,” he said. “What kind of thing would make you want me gone forever? And not just a spur-of-the-moment killing. Something you planned for, knowing all too well the consequences of getting caught.”

“I don’t even want to think of it.”

“It’s helpful.”

The ensuing silence was heavy, and Colin knew what Meg was doing. She was running through all the scenarios in her mind and trying not to make them so real as to believe they could happen. But she was thinking about it.

Finally, out of that silence, she spoke.

“I think if I found out you loved someone else,” she said, a crack in her voice. “Not just having an affair but truly loved someone else. Maybe even had another family. Maybe even had a kid with her. I don’t think I could handle that.”

Colin knew how unlikely the scenario was. In love with someone else? A hidden family? A secret love child? That sounded like a nightmare.

“Even then, I’m not sure I could kill you,” she whispered. “Or at least plan to. Maybe in the heat of the moment, but not otherwise.”

Colin said nothing. These were the statements you just left there, taking up space.

She went quiet for a period longer.

Then she said, “No. The only thing that would make me kill you is if I thought you would hurt us.”

Us. Colin squeezed his eyes shut against the dark and tried to force away the image of him hurting his wife and unborn child.

“If I thought you would hurt us, and leaving you wouldn’t stop you, then, I think. Then I could kill you. Make a plan. Carry it out.”

He couldn’t remain silent any longer. “That’s awful.”

“I know,” she said. “But you did ask.”

“Yeah. I did.”

“So you think he was hurting her?”

Colin had asked himself that same question many times over.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “There weren’t any signs of it from Cooper’s report, and he would’ve noticed anything obvious.”

“But everyone is different,” Meg added. “Not all women are the same, you know.”

“I know.”

“Maybe she has a threshold that’s lower than mine. But I still don’t think she did it.”

He turned to her, though she couldn’t see him. “Because you can’t figure out motive?”

“Maybe,” Meg said. “But she’s also a writer. Her book seems so…well researched. Organized.”

“So what, then?”

“I don’t know. It’s like…somebody capable of writing multiple books is too sound of mind to commit homicide.”

Meg was a helluva lot smarter than that, Colin knew. Maybe she just had some kind of soft spot for the Yates woman, he thought.

“Or just the opposite,” he said. “Maybe she knows a lot about killing because of what she writes. And maybe she writes what she does because she has a dark part of her trying to get out. You ever heard of Clara Tomson?”