“He doesn’t appear to be at home. We’re wondering why that is.”

“Is he being held in custody?” another reporter butted in.

She checked the space where Paul’s car would usually be. It was true, she realized. He’d been gone since the previous afternoon.

“I don’t know.” Pressure was escalating in her head. Even in her state of confusion about whom to trust, a defense of the Harlows erupted out of her: “Just leave them in peace, won’t you?”

“What about Chris Watson? Has he been arrested?”

“I said I don’t know! Why would I?”

She shoved through the throng, made it into the house, and slammed the exterior door. At the same moment, a smell hit her nostrils. It was the pungent scent of a certain area of the local park, the whiff of something nasty dragged home on the bottom of a shoe. She checked the soles of her boots, but they were clean. Her eyes watered and she stoppered her nose as she looked around the hallway.

A package was half wedged through the letterbox. She could tell instantly that the envelope was soft and moist, little flecks of brown seeping at the corners. When she tugged at the very edge she felt its horrible squelch, and as it came free of the jaws of the letterbox she yelped and dropped it to the floor.

Dog shit now? Really, Robin?

Disgusting. Childish. Pathetic.

Except she couldn’t even use these words to diminish her own horror. This package was the thing that finally made her tears erupt.

42.

STEPH

Steph knew she had to listen to what George was asking her as he leaned forward from her sofa while she hunched in her window seat. But there was chaos in her head, white noise in her ears, grief in the pit of her stomach, and anger at the grief because a bloodied jacket did not mean the end. It wasn’t helpful to Freya to think the worst, to howl with loss, to stop breathing every few seconds because some irrational part of her feared she was stealing breaths that should have been her daughter’s . . .

“Steph, I’m sorry, I know this is hard . . . but do you recognize this?”

George was holding his iPad toward her, with a picture on its screen. Steph didn’t want to look. The last thing he’d shown her, early that morning, had been the photo of Freya’s jacket for her to identify. Crudely buried, bloodstained, folded over, like somebody lying on their side. Steph had been convinced that the next words out of his mouth were going to be about body parts or bones. She understood now what people meant when they talked about time stopping. It had been the worst moment of her life.

Now George expected her to contemplate another image on that screen.