Senior Special Agent Ronald Baughan, BATF, Certified Explosives Specialist, retired.

Field research, weapons: Keith Benoist, force recon marine and budding writer.

Historical expertise: Ron Miller.

Legal advice: Michael Henry, District Attorney Ronnie Harper, Kevin Colbert, Chancery Judge George Ward, Circuit Judge Lillie Blackmon Sanders.

Medical advice: Dr. Jerry W. Iles, Dr. Michael Bourland.

Cultural perspective: Mildred Lyles, Georgia Ware, Peter Rinaldi.

Advance readers: Ed Stackler, Natasha Kern, Courtney Aldridge, Mary Lou England, Betty Iles, Michael Henry, Dianne Brown.

To those I omitted through oversight, my apologies.

All mistakes are mine.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked:

for whatsoever a man soweth,

that shall he also reap.

—GALATIANS 6:7

CHAPTER 1

I am standing in line for Walt Disney’s It’s a Small World ride, holding my four-year-old daughter in my arms, trying to entertain her as the serpentine line of parents and children moves slowly toward the flat-bottomed boats emerging from the grotto to the music of an endless audio loop. Suddenly Annie jerks taut in my arms and points into the crowd.

“Daddy! I saw Mama! Hurry!”

I do not look. I don’t ask where. I don’t because Annie’s mother died seven months ago. I stand motionless in the line, looking just like everyone else except for the hot tears that have begun to sting my eyes.

Annie keeps pointing into the crowd, becoming more and more agitated. Even in Disney World, where periodic meltdowns are common, her fit draws stares. Clutching her struggling body against mine, I work my way back through the line, which sends her into outright panic. The green metal chutes double back upon themselves to create the illusion of a short queue for prospective riders. I push past countless staring families, finally reaching the relative openness between the Carousel and Dumbo.

Holding Annie tighter, I rock and turn in slow circles as I did to calm her when she was an infant. A streaming mass of teenagers breaks around us like a river around a rock and pays us about as much attention. A claustrophobic sense of futility envelops me, a feeling I never experienced prior to my wife’s illness but which now dogs me like a malignant shadow. If I could summon a helicopter to whisk us back to the Polynesian Resort, I would pay ten thousand dollars to do it. But there is no helicopter. Only us. Or the less-than-us that we’ve been since Sarah died.

The vacation is over. And when the vacation is over, you go home. But where is home? Technically Houston, the suburb of Tanglewood. But Houston doesn’t feel like home anymore. The Houston house has a hole in it now. A hole that moves from room to room.