“What did Adam say when you told him about your various one-night stands and your long-running affair with Damon Blundy?” Mum asks.

“He said, ‘I’ll forgive you all your sins, but only if you take me on a no-expense-spared snowboarding vacation in the French Alps.’ No, he didn’t really. I’m kidding. And I had no long-running or indeed short-running affair with Damon Blundy. I thought you believed in honesty—doesn’t it bother you to make up a pack of lies about me and keep putting it forward as the truth?”

“What did Adam say, Nicki? When you told him about your many infidelities?”

Many? Melissa only knows about two since I got together with Adam. Add to those my fictional affair with Damon Blundy: three. Hardly “many.” Mum needs to get out more. Actually, given that she lives with Dad, she needs to get out permanently. If she’d been braver as a young woman and allowed herself to see him for what he is and act on it, there might have been some hope for her.

“It’s none of your fucking business what Adam said. Generally, I tend not to discuss my private life with people who inform on me to the police when I’m innocent.”

I hang up and sit still in my chair, waiting for my feelings to catch up with what’s just happened. It will take a while. I must make the most of this numb time to get as much done as possible. Preparations.

Will Adam ask for a divorce? Is this the true beginning of my life falling apart?

I must do whatever it takes to extricate myself from being suspected of murder. If that means telling the police my real reason for making a quick getaway on Elmhirst Road on Monday, so be it. I’m not a coward like my mother. I’ll do what I have to do.

I pick up the phone and call Adam at work. When he answers, I say, “I need you to come home.”

AN HOUR LATER, ADAM and I are in our bedroom with the door closed. Downstairs, the TV reassures our children by producing its usual comforting early evening burble of voices. Sophie and Ethan have no idea that they might soon need more comforting than usual. Hopefully, if I handle this right, they will never find out how close they came to having their world shattered.

“So . . . what is this?” Adam asks. “Don’t tell me you’ve dragged me home from work to show me three colored glass angels?”