I wonder if the darkness grew inside his head. I wonder if he ever smelled decaying roses and cursed the color of his eyes or the feel of his own skin. But I didn’t ask him. I would never ask him.

First rule of lying, remember? You never acknowledge it.

And it occurred to me, over a bowl of soggy cereal, that I could live like this. Compartmentalized. There, but separate. Together, but alone. Loving, but isolated. This is how I had been living most of my life, after all. In a household where my mother might appear in the middle of the night to do unspeakable things with a hairbrush. Then hours later, we’d sit across from one another sharing a platter of buttermilk biscuits for breakfast.

My mother had prepared me well for this life.

I glanced over at my husband, crunching away on Cheerios. I wondered who had prepared him.

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The Boston Police Department’s press conference started at 9:03 A.M. And Jason knew the second it ended, because his cell phone rang.

He hadn’t watched the briefing. Once he’d wiped his daughter’s tears and fed one very demanding Mr. Smith, he’d loaded both his daughter and the cat into Sandy’s Volvo. Mr. Smith had sprawled out in a sunny spot and gone immediately to sleep, the rare cat who actually liked car rides. Ree, in turn, sat in her booster seat, clutching Lil’ Bunny to her chest while she stared at Mr. Smith as if she were willing him to stay put.

Jason drove. Mostly because he needed to move. He felt as if he were on the open plains of Kansas, watching a twister touch down and helpless to get out of its path. He could only watch the sky darken, feel the first whip of hurricane-force winds against his face.

The cops had held a press conference. The media machine was now slowly but surely roaring to life. There was nothing he could do about it. There was nothing anyone could do.

His phone rang again. He eyed his screen, feeling his sense of fatalism swell.

Using the rearview mirror, he glanced at his daughter again, the serious look on her face as she tried to find happiness in watching her cat sleep when what she wanted most in the world was to hug her mother.

He flipped the phone open and held it to his ear.

“Hello, Greg.”

“Holy shit,” the senior news editor of the Boston Daily exploded in his ear. “Why didn’t you tell us, Jason? Hell, we’re like family. We woulda understood.”

“It’s been a trying time,” Jason said automatically, feeling the words come out by rote as they had before, so long ago. Wanna be on the front page? All it will cost you is your life. Or maybe your child’s. Or maybe your wife’s.