The more she thought about it, the more contacting Paul Harlow seemed her only remaining option. I can’t lose either of them, Steph had said. This is all my fault. Was that true, Emma wondered. What about Paul’s shadow on the stairs that first night, Steph hunched on the bottom step with a bleeding ear? What about his raised voice the next evening, the smashing glass, the way he’d shaken off that woman on Kingston Bridge?

Were these images so vivid because Emma knew what it felt like to be threatened by a man? If she could just rinse Andy and Robin out of her system, would she be able to see clearly, know who to trust?

There had been plenty of strange behavior from Steph as well. But Emma had felt an inexplicable loyalty toward her. Perhaps she’d idolized her, in a way, because she’d seemed like one of the golden girls Emma had never been at school, with a golden daughter to match . . .

She felt a sudden wave of exhaustion, trying to understand her neighbors, to untangle her life from theirs. Maybe Steph and Paul were really just two parents in absolute crisis. Maybe the only thing left was to drop all judgments and allegiances, and give them the chance to make things right.

Then she had to figure out how to do the same with her own child. And hope that the two quests weren’t in conflict.

58.

PAUL

Paul thrust open his living-room window. A rush of night air hit his bruised face, widened his drowsy eyes. He slapped his cheeks to revive himself. His daughter and his wife were somewhere out there in this long, strange night. Paul had to expand his tunnel vision now, try to see the things his guilty conscience might have obscured.

Looking down at the newspaper cutting in his hand, he scoured the faded type yet again.

A poisoning, back in the nineties. The reporter had made a big deal of the controversial case: a young woman accused of murdering an older man.

He threw it down on the coffee table and flipped through the photos that had also been scattered in the hall. One showed a teenage girl with bobbed dark hair and a confident smile. The same girl was in another picture, standing between an overweight woman and a bearded man.

And then there was the birth certificate. The paper was thin as he lifted it, trembling slightly in the breeze from the window. This document was the most baffling, most troubling.

Because the date of birth was the same as Steph’s. And yet the name wasn’t.

Had somebody left these items, deliberately, to be found? Were they a clue, a warning?