“That she had a best friend. He was sweet about it. He was so nice,” she said. None of that, however, mattered. As October rolled over into November, then December, Emily’s own world rocked with Belinda’s indecision. “When he would leave on Sunday night, then we’d be back together. Stefan would head out and I would move back in. She would make me leave in the middle of the night, but she didn’t make him leave. I knew they didn’t do, you know, everything, because she had this Christianity rule about being a virgin when she got married. But they did lots of things in bed. Almost everything, including things we did together. I would go nuts thinking of her with him, like that. I would rip her sheets off the bed. I would pray he would get in a car accident on the way back and die.”

Stefan’s eyes were terrible. I could only imagine the blistering effect of such intimate talk, from this girl’s mouth, in front of his mother—and how it must have brought back unbidden images of Belinda, fearsome in their sweetness.

Right before Christmas, Belinda told Emily that Stefan would soon move to Black Creek full-time. He was going to start school, with one class, then a full load in spring. Now Belinda would have to make that long-deferred choice. If Stefan thought he would win in the long game, Emily thought she would lose. How could she lose Belinda? Her lover-angel-best friend, Belinda’s cologne on her palms, Belinda’s strong athlete’s legs and hips, her voice singing off-key in the morning light as she boiled water for tea, how could she lose all this? She decided to wait. She decided to do something to stop him. She said, “He’s right. I did want to kill him, Thea.”

“And you mean, really kill him?”

“Not bomb his house or something. But he wasn’t an idiot. If he died, it would be his own fault. It would be because he was too big a dope fiend to turn anything down and take care of his own life.”

And that was when Emily said, she stepped over the wire. She began to make her plan.

How could I sit here with such a creature in my home? Yes, she was also a victim, if only of Jill’s consuming obsession; but this did nothing to stem my revulsion. I tried to remember what it was like to be eighteen years old and desperately in lust, truly believing that your sole umbilical cord to joy was attached to one person. I loved Jep but I had never felt like that about anyone—not until Stefan was born and my helpless love surrounded him like a nimbus.