“That’s okay,” said Katie. She stared at the ceiling, back to her self-contained, unflappable self. She was waiting for Sherri to leave so she could continue writing in Morgan Coleman’s cast-off notebook; eventually Sherri did leave. So what if it was a diary? Shouldn’t all young girls be allowed to keep a diary? In fact, wasn’t a diary actually a refreshing change from all of their iScreens, and shouldn’t this behavior be encouraged? What could be the harm in it, really? Katie didn’t know a lot of the specifics—Sherri had been very careful to shield her from the worst of it, and the counselor had declared her remarkably well-adjusted, considering.

And yet. What if Sherri was mistaken about that? What if Katie knew more than she was letting on? What if Katie put secrets in that notebook? Not little-girl secrets like who had a crush on whom but big, bad, grown-up secrets, the kind that nobody could ever, ever, ever read.

What then?

Did Bobby remember the night they met the way Sherri did? She’d never know, now. They were at a bar in Jersey City. She was with two of her girlfriends, the same friends she’d had in high school. The three of them were twenty-one, fresh-faced and innocent. Sherri was alone in the world. Alone! Her mother had died when she was seventeen, and her father started drinking and never stopped. She had no place she belonged. No siblings, not even a cousin nearby.

At the bar that night Bobby smiled at her. He bought her a mudslide. That’s how young she was, she thought mudslides were sophisticated! He tipped the bartender with a twenty and she was agog.

Sherri fell for Bobby Giordano from that first minute. She fell and she fell and she fell.

Typically Bobby conducted his business outside the house, but every now and then the guys came over and they all met in his office. Who, Sherri always wondered, was sitting closest to the register that held all of the secrets? Did the guys know about it? Did each of them have a similar hiding place in their homes, and did the wives know about those hiding places?