Notepads, a couple of flash drives and chargers. Pens, paper clips. Her stapler that she’d been looking for. There was money in one little drawer in the hutch, and Carly tamped down that unnameable little zing of what-if that leaped up at the sight of a stack of unsupervised cash. Did everyone feel that automatically? She would never steal. That was way low.

She heard her mother laugh from the dining room, and the longer Carly went unable to ask her mother what was wrong with John, the less she wanted to. If there was something wrong and her mother knew it, what were the chances her mother would say anything but Nothing, everything’s fine? And if her mother didn’t know that something was wrong with John, the answer would still be the same and it would just give her mother a new, different kind of worried look on her face that would also be Carly’s fault.

The doorbell rang her right out of wondering if this was the wrong way to think of these things.

The pattern in the glass made a mosaic mountain of the man on the other side of the front door. Like one of the shattered-looking Picassos in the art books. All Carly could see was that he was tall, wearing a suit, and not standing like a cop.

When the police had come back to the house for follow-ups, they would always position themselves turned slightly out, maybe to keep a wider view of what was around them, or maybe just not to look so there and so like a solid wall of bad news. They put you at ease with at least a partial view of the way out. This man took up the whole door.

“Carly, who’s that?” her mother called, leaning out from the dining room with her phone still to her ear.

Her mother was right there, watching. So Carly opened the door to find out.

The man was totally comfortable standing full on at her, shoulders straight parallel with the threshold and his empty hands loose at his sides. They weren’t folded in front of him or tucked in his pockets or linked somewhere behind his back. That was just weird. Carly realized that nobody stood at a stranger’s door like that.

He stepped back, a maneuver to tune down whatever he was reading off her. But she’d seen that trick before. It didn’t mean anything. It certainly didn’t mean she was safe. She kept her hand flat against the back of the door to shove if she needed to. She’d be much faster this time.

But the man smiled. “Hi. I’m looking for Jonathan.”

“John’s not here right now. My mother’s here, though. Do you want to talk to her?”

“You must be Carly.”