Paul responded with something Emma couldn’t make out. Heavy footsteps paced back and forth. She pictured Paul stomping from one end of their apartment to the other, and Steph with her back against a wall, as pale as when she’d been lying on the stairs. Emma slipped into the cupboard, hardly thinking about what she was doing or why. She twined her fingers around the bars of Gilbert’s cage and heard him stir.

“I’ve never asked you about any of it,” Steph was saying. “But now . . .”

“I will fix this.”

“Freya—”

“I know! God, do I know, Steph.”

“If she’s in any danger—”

“I said I KNOW—”

There was a bang. The sound of shattering glass. Before she knew it, Emma had thrown herself onto the floor with her hands over her head. A second later she unfurled, hot with embarrassment at her own jumpiness, still with her after years of trying to be fearless. She saw she’d knocked Gilbert’s cage and he was awake and glaring at her. The noises above were suspended. Then Paul was saying, “Shit . . .” and there was movement, footsteps.

Nothing from Steph until her voice returned laced with tears: “Where are you going?”

Another slamming door. Another tremor through the spine of the building. Emma crept out of the cupboard and to the window. It was Paul who’d left. She watched him stride off down the darkening road, coat on and hood up, the pale wash of the streetlamps gliding over him.

More footsteps drummed down the exterior staircase. Emma saw Steph burst out of the main door, glance both ways and yell something after Paul. She surged forward as if to chase her husband, but stopped dead and floundered in the road, already seeming like an unraveled version of the neighbor Emma had observed and envied. Steph’s posture collapsed and she trudged back to the house. Emma strained to see if she looked injured from whatever had been smashed. Steph was stooped, crying, but Emma couldn’t tell whether she was physically hurt.

She wondered again if she should reach out to her neighbor. How could she just sit there, knowing she was upstairs? What kind of person watched, listened, but didn’t try to help?

She was edging toward her door, fizzing with nerves, when she heard an unexpected knock.

8.

STEPH

Steph no longer felt as if she was in her body. The sleepless night and nightmarish day had taken her to pieces. Part of her was still in the street, shouting, “Where are you going?” as Paul charged into the night. Another part was trapped in the surreal motions of registering their daughter as a missing person. Reciting her date of birth and her blood group, handing over her smiling photograph to be sealed inside a clear plastic bag.