It made me wonder how many times I’d walked or driven by this same building, lost in my own world, while somebody else’s world was ending just out of sight.

Or, better yet, how many times had I laughed joyously in my own home while someone else sobbed a few doors down?

I’d seen Emma’s face, just before I left, through the glass window of the interrogation room where she was still sitting. She was staring straight ahead, her gaze fixed on something or someone else in the room that I couldn’t see. Her mouth was slightly open, and her skin was flushed, and she just sat there…transfixed. There were no traces of the woman I’d first seen just a week and a half earlier, standing proudly and confidently in her window. That woman was gone.

And I had to wonder. Had she ever been there?

Or was that just the woman I wanted to see?

I’d tried to tell the detectives everything, but the words and the stories had been jumbled in my head. I described my first meeting with Emma that day in the park—how she’d frozen up not, as I thought, because I’d mentioned the Ryan Hooks concert, but because Andrew had been there and he kept mentioning his wife. I explained that Emma had told me the truth right before she’d grabbed the laptop out of my hands and smashed it to the floor. That she’d opened up to me, with fury in her eyes, about her best friend Bev who seemed to have it all.

“She doesn’t love him, you know,” she’d said. “And she wouldn’t let him go. She had Ryan Hooks hovering around all night, coming, leaving, coming back. Ryan Hooks! And she still couldn’t let go of Andrew. I begged her. I said, ‘Marie, you know how I feel about him,’ but she was just so damned stubborn, so committed to this perfect image, she wouldn’t dare get a divorce, and she’d sucked him into believing the same thing.”

I’d frozen. “Wait. Marie?”

“Oh, only close friends and family called her that,” Emma said. “It’s her middle name.”

Of course.

M.

Detective Puhl had made a point of saying she was letting me go, for now.

“We’ll be monitoring your accounts,” she’d said sternly, and I nodded. She seemed to believe that Hooks truly had taken the money back the night he broke in—but I understood why they had to check.

“No problem,” I said. “Monitor anything you like. There won’t be anything to find.”

She stared at me for a moment. “And I’m assuming you’re not going to press charges for the break-in, given…”

“No,” I said quietly, measuring each word. “I don’t have any real proof it was him, and…after everything else…”