We’d all watched her when we’d walked through the front door even though we had tried to pretend we weren’t; at least Abbi and I had. Scott’s eyes were glued to her. He didn’t bother to hide his eagerness at her reaction to their home. The desperation in his eyes at wanting something to spark her back to life was unmistakable, and so was the pain that followed when she reacted to it like she had to everything else around her—terrified.

I was glad to be home and out of the car, though. I couldn’t have endured another moment of silence. Scott wasn’t much of a talker on road trips, so we usually listened to music or audiobooks, but he had said something might trigger Kate, and we weren’t equipped to handle her if she had an episode in the car. What did that even mean? And if we couldn’t handle her episodes in the car, how would we handle them at home? Her psychiatrists kept referring to episodes, but they wouldn’t come right out and say what that meant, and so far I hadn’t seen one. Was she dangerous? Scott had assured me she wasn’t, but how well did he really know her?

Kate coming home changed everything. That went without saying. But it changed my entire view of her as a person too. I had been sure she was dead. No part of me ever believed she was alive, no matter what Scott had said about it or how he had felt. Never. I had only seen him as a grieving man refusing to accept that his wife was dead from the first moment he’d shared his story in group. I had never told him, though, because it would’ve hurt him, and as time went on it was one of the things that drew me to him. I’d never seen a man so unapologetically in love with a woman even long after she was gone. James hadn’t loved me that way, and he’d never once looked at me the way Scott looked when he said Kate’s name.

How was it possible she’d been alive all this time? I’d always been as convinced of her love and devotion to Scott as he was, but was it possible he’d been mistaken? Maybe there was someone else. What if she’d gone willingly?

Don’t be ridiculous, I admonished myself.

“Meredith?” Scott called from downstairs, interrupting my thoughts. “Where did you put the extra batteries?”

I hurried back downstairs to get them myself, since it would be easier than trying to direct him to them. I dug through the back of the junk drawer in the linen closet until I found them. He plopped them into the flashlight and handed it to me. “Give her this so she can find her way through the house at night if she needs to,” he said. “I’ll pick up a packet of night-lights tomorrow to put in the hallway and bathrooms, but it’s too late to run out now. Everything is closed.”