How did I get anything accomplished in my life? How did I talk to Amanda or interact with Henry with my face buried in my screens?

I held the phone with a tight grip and resisted the urge to throw it in the trash can in our kitchen. Instead I plugged it in, allowing it to suck up its vital electricity, and wandered out to the living room, where I plopped onto the couch and picked up a novel I’d been attempting to read for the past month.

The house remained quiet. The smell of the coffee and the toast still filled the air. It felt strange to sit down and read with the phone so far away. It took me a few pages to remember what was going on in the story, because it had been days since I’d looked at it. But slowly things came back to me. A teenage boy during the Crusades had been apprenticed to a powerful knight. They prepared to set sail for the Holy Land. The author described the ringing of steel blade against steel blade, the smells of horses and cooking meat. I fell into the story. My mind cleared as I concentrated on one thing at a time and one thing only. I forgot about Blake and Jennifer and everything else that had happened, so much so that when the doorbell rang, I jumped about a foot off the couch.

Amanda?

But no. She’d come in the back door. And she never forgot her keys. And it was too soon for her to be finished with picking up Henry and talking to her parents. They’d never let her—or their only grandchild—get away so quickly.

I reluctantly set the book aside, using the subscription insert from a magazine as my bookmark, and went to the door. I thought about going to the kitchen and grabbing the baseball bat but decided against it. The boogeyman was gone, secure in the jail downtown, surrounded by cops and lawyers and bars. Aaron made a sad picture in my mind, locked up as he was, his life derailed by that night in college. And now Blake would be up to his neck in it for that night. I looked longingly at the book and the escape it promised to the Middle Ages.

I peeked out the window that afforded me a view of the porch. When I saw who was outside, I wished even more that I could go back to reading. I went over and undid the locks, opening the door to Detective Rountree. My hands shook as I stepped back, an involuntary reflex in the presence of cops, and one intensified by everything Rountree knew about me.

What could she possibly have shown up for?

She nodded to me as she came into the room. She looked around, although I wasn’t sure what she was seeking.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.