Blake looks away, bored by the speech or pretending to be.

Then she says it, she has to. “They might even think you’ve got something to do with Sorrel’s disappearance.”

She’s lost him. She knows that as soon as he turns away and wrenches the door open. He scrambles out and starts running; for a moment it looks like he’ll continue running down the street but at the last second he swerves into Eve’s drive and disappears.

A minute later a car follows him in, Melly driving Paul’s car very slowly.

It’s cold now, but sweat is trickling down her back. Stupidly handled. Martin might have done better after all. Blake’s school backpack is in the footwell where he dumped it; she picks it up, hesitates, then tips it out on the seat. The books tumble out first—a dog-eared workbook, a geography textbook—pens, then several empty packets of chips followed by a snowstorm of candy wrappers. The empty bag feels heavier than it normally does. She shakes again but nothing further falls out and then she remembers. Blake had been thrilled when he unwrapped this backpack four Christmases ago. It was the same as Martin’s, made for camping expeditions, replete with flaps and hidden pockets. Martin had shown him the zipper under the rectangle of thick plastic lining the base of the bag; she’d been resigned to the thought of the candy he would stash in there. Now she pushes her fingers into the space, encountering, as she knew she would, a slim shape, roughly bundled in toilet paper to stop it from sliding around.

Mr. Richards would have found it if he’d known where to look. The shears were a decoy, as it turns out, intentional or not. This is the danger. She unwraps it with trembling fingers. A knife lies in her hands; a thing of beauty with a smooth indigo-blue handle and a long, shining blade. She turns on the light in the car. A line of red lies along the edge of the blade, separated into minute granules, thicker at the edge where it makes an uneven reddish stripe thinning to pale orange. If she looks hard enough she can convince herself there are little pieces of matter caught along the edge, dehydrated fragments, translucent like skin. She puts it down on the pile of candy wrappers, her head thumping to the rhythm of three questions: Whose blood, whose skin, who exactly has her son hurt?

Eve

“Sorrel!”

A crow rises from the ground, black wings flapping. Empty branches scrape the sky; the day is ticking fast toward its end. The police and their dogs have searched the wood again; Eve is still looking. There may be clues left on the ground, under the fallen leaves, or caught on a branch, something small the police might have missed.

“Sorrel, answer me, baby.”

Her foot strikes unexpected softness. She moves the covering leaves with care and leans close to the ground, her heart tipping forward in her mouth. She sees a rounded shape, brown-gray fur, soft ears. A dead rabbit. She turns it with a foot and the guts spill out, mauve and gray against the amber leaves. She straightens, feeling sick, and walks away, halting at a leafless horse chestnut tree at the back of the wood by the fence. The children had been sitting in the dappled shade of a chestnut tree when she found them with Martin that afternoon in May, maybe the very same one. Babes in the wood, he had said; she should have taken that as a warning.