My in-laws lived halfway down on the right, a redbrick house with large windows and a three-car garage. I half expected my mother-in-law, Karen, to be standing on the lawn, arms wide, ready to snatch Henry out of the backseat and whisk him into the house. But she wasn’t outside.

Yet.

I pulled into their driveway and stopped. But I kept the car running.

“Do you want to leave?” I asked.

“No. I’m sure they saw us. We’ll just have to . . . I don’t know. I don’t want to tell them about Kyle coming to the house. Not right away. Or Blake. Or any of it. I’ll try to keep it under wraps.”

“Good luck. Their favorite pastimes are worrying and asking questions.”

“Cut them some slack,” Amanda said, repeating one of her favorite lines. “You know why they act this way.”

As if on cue, the front door opened, and Karen came breezing out, on her face a smile as wide as the front yard. She wore a hooded sweatshirt, and leggings that emphasized the figure she kept slim through hours of tennis and yoga.

Amanda placed her hand on my knee. “Are you okay? You don’t have to come in. You can just go. You can call Rountree and try to find out what’s going on.”

“She won’t answer if she’s in the middle of all that craziness.”

“It might not be Blake,” she said. “It might be someone we don’t even know about.”

“True. We don’t know what all Jennifer was mixed up with. Or who.”

I thought of the hateful comments on Twitter, the ones accusing her of everything from organized crime to drug trafficking. I scolded myself for thinking the same way, for letting that virus infect me.

I had no idea what was going on. None of us did.

But before I could regroup, the back door of the car was pulled open, and Karen was leaning in, unbuckling Henry from his car seat as he squealed for joy at the sight of her.

“There’s our little guy,” she said. “Look how big he’s getting. I think he’s bigger today than he was yesterday.” She removed Henry from the car so fast you would have thought we were sinking in a lake and he needed to be rescued. “Come in, come in,” she said. “I’m so happy to see all of you.”

Amanda and I looked at each other. We felt we had no choice.

We unbuckled and followed grandmother and grandson into the house.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

“Bill?” Karen still held Henry, and she called to her husband from the foyer. “Bill? They’re here.”

“Mom, where is he?” Amanda asked.

“He’s glued to the TV. Where else? I’m sure he can’t hear me.”

“Then why are you yelling for him?” Amanda asked.