“Do you really want to go over there and face the Spanish Inquisition as performed by Bill and Karen? Besides, I could stand to get out of the house. I’ve felt like a prisoner lately. Hell, I was afraid to go anywhere for fear I’d get murdered. It will be nice to go and not worry about that.”

“Okay,” I said. And I knew she was right. The last thing I wanted to do was endure the inevitable barrage of questions about Aaron and Blake and Jennifer that my in-laws would fire my way like a series of missiles. “I understand.”

When she went upstairs to get dressed, I felt lonely and pointless, cut off from everything. Normally I reached for my phone when I felt that way, but the phone and social media landscape offered no escape. I knew everywhere I scrolled or clicked I’d see news and questions about Jennifer and Blake and Aaron.

It seemed to take Amanda longer than normal to get ready, but eventually she came back down, dressed and ready to go. She stood across the room, her keys in her hand, the look on her face tense and guarded. “We can talk about this more,” she said. “I know there’s more to say. I guess I have more to say. And I’m trying not to be unfair and lay everything at your feet.”

“It’s okay. I get it.”

She started to go and then seemed to remember something. She came over and pecked me on the cheek, a gesture that seemed strangely chaste and forced. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Okay. It’s not such a long drive. You’re making it sound like you’re going to be gone for hours.”

But she didn’t respond to that. She went out the door, and once she left, I started looking for something to distract me in the real world instead of the virtual one.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

The police had seized my computer from Blake at Hilldale Estates, so I couldn’t work. It hadn’t been made clear to me yet exactly why Blake needed the computer. I knew he wanted to access the messages from Jennifer’s phone because he’d tossed the phone away, but I didn’t know why. Without the laptop in the house, and with the inhospitable landscape of social media at that moment, I felt like my right arm had been severed from my body.

In the fifteen minutes after Amanda left the house, I couldn’t count how many times I glanced at my phone, lifting it toward my face, prepared to click on an app, only to realize I needed to heed Amanda’s advice and not look. But then I asked myself a deeper and more profound question, one I’d refused to contemplate before that day: How many times in an hour do I look at my phone? Fifty? One hundred?