The parade of cops and their pair of guarded civilians crossed the two front yards, properly on the sidewalks this time, not in the grass. (That’s the square where he called to me and I stopped. I should have kept walking. Or started running. Infinity.) Carly was steered across the stoop with her mother’s shoulder set against her own, her mother’s arm around Carly’s waist. The door was unlocked, so the police went in first. Each of them stepped over the lump of her backpack, but Carly picked it up and put it on the bench as she would have done if it had been a regular day.

And just like that, everything looked normal. As if it—whatever it really was—had never happened.

Carly excused herself to the bathroom and stared into the mirror. The only difference she could make out was in the urge she felt to pull a face. She bared her teeth at her reflection. But that was the wrong kind of different. She flushed the toilet and ran the water in the sink to buy more time.

The beep of the sensor on the opening front door zapped her heart back into her throat. But that was stupid. It wasn’t like the guy would come back. And it wasn’t like she was all alone this time.

Still, the best she could manage was to lean her ear to the door, listening, her heart kicking in her chest. Someone rushed past the bathroom. Then she heard her mother’s muffled cry: “John!”

Carly flung open the door.

They’d been a family of two since Carly was a toddler. Her father had left them, divorced them, and evaporated before she’d ever known him. Her mother, though, was a hard, unstoppable, high-speed engine of shake-it-off. Carly sometimes wondered if part of the reason her father was so thoroughly gone was that her mother was so thoroughly fine with it.

But it only took two to live a good life. Carly didn’t remember being anything but happy enough with just the two of them. It was still her default setting: me and Mom.

But Carly was better than halfway to genuinely loving her stepfather. He was fun. He hadn’t made her mother different as Carly had feared he would. He’d blended into the background of Donna’s bustle, as if he were happy enough to be a nice nothing. Everything was almost the same except where they lived—their regular life plus one, with barely a ripple. He made them three, but Carly had not yet thought about him as part of this insane day.

John looked up from the crook of her mother’s neck and gently maneuvered out of her arms. He took a deep breath, came to Carly, and wrapped her up.

“Holy shit, Carlzee.”