Amanda sighed. She looked over at Henry, who bobbed his head between the two of us. “I looked last night. I hadn’t looked since the first messages came. Since that night I was pregnant. I feel gross doing that. But last night . . . you were gone. It was weird. It was weird when I called the basketball game. It was weird the way you left. And I’m sitting here, feeling a little isolated, to be honest. You’re basically working two jobs, and I’m working none. It feels like your life is going by like a speeding bullet. The job, the bar, the sports. And I’m here lactating and changing diapers. So I snooped. I couldn’t help it.”

“You know I would never . . . I wasn’t.”

“I know that. And I’m as disappointed in myself as anything else. That’s not who I am. But then . . . what the hell is going on? You’ve been acting awfully strange, last night and this morning. And you’re glued to the news about that woman being killed. And she was after you. What am I supposed to make of that?”

“It’s not like that,” I said, shaking my head.

And I was ready to come clean, to tell her everything. Wouldn’t someone crack apart under the pressure of being two-faced all the time?

“Then what is it like?” she asked.

Somebody rang the doorbell. At the front of the house.

“Who the hell is that?” Amanda asked. “Who would come to the door this early in the morning?”

“I don’t know. I’ll get rid of them.”

As I stood up, I noticed an unpleasant odor emanating from Henry’s direction. Either the milk had given him gas, or he needed to be changed. Badly.

“Did you—”

“I smell it,” Amanda said. “I’ll take him.”

“I’ll get rid of whoever it is,” I said. “And then we can finish talking.”

Amanda pulled Henry out of his high chair and took a whiff of his bottom. Every feature on her face curled. “Ugh. Funny how you get to go to the door, and I get the pile of shit.”

“We can switch if you want. Maybe it will be Blake. Would you like to talk to him?”

She shook her head. “He’s worse than the smelly diaper.”

“What happened to turning the page and moving on?”

“Oh, right. Okay . . . I’ll be kind.”

While she went upstairs, I went out to the front of the house. Before I opened the door, I peeked through the front window. I saw a woman in business attire—blue suit, white shirt—on the stoop. Middle-aged. Serious looking. As if she felt my eyes on her, she turned and looked at me, locking on to my eyes through the glass.

She waved. Not a friendly wave that said Hello. It was a wave that said Hurry up and open this door.

So I did.