Chapter 1

Nine thirty-six on a Saturday night, and I was standing in the alley office with my hand in my sister-in-law's tote bag.

I'd gone in for the deposit slips. That's all. Thursday's league money had to be in the night drop by ten, and Rennie had been handling the banking since August, and I wanted to know why the deposits had gone thin.

What I found was a manila envelope, folded once, flap torn.

I knew the paper before I pulled it out. I'd seen it on the kitchen table in September, unsigned. This copy had my name at the bottom of page four in a slant that wasn't mine.

Della Faye Mabry. My mother's name in the middle, the way I only ever wrote it on legal documents.

Whoever forged it hadn't known that.

Under the sale agreement were two deposit slips - eleven hundred, nine-fifty - and a letter from the bank on Third. I put everything back, took the envelope, and walked out of the office fast enough that the screen door banged.

Nine thirty-seven. I stepped into the party-room doorway and my left shoe caught on the gray rubber mat that had been in the storage closet all week.

It was laid smooth-side-up. Nobody lays a mat smooth-side-up by accident.

I went down on my right hip. My arm came across my belly before I told it to. Lane three's pinsetter hummed behind the glass wall, and the fluorescent tube over the counter flickered twice and then held.

Then Rennie was over me.

She came from the lane side, both hands already closing on the envelope against my chest. She didn't say my name. She just leaned her weight down through her shoulders the way you'd pull a nail.

The flap tore.

"Let go of it, Della. Right now."

The party-room door slammed off the wall hard enough to rattle the trophy shelf.

Trent filled the doorway. Navy polo, work boots wet from the lot, keys still swinging on his belt. He stopped dead.

He looked at his sister bent over his pregnant wife. He looked at me on the floor of the business I owned a third of. Then he stepped toward neither of us.

Rennie's hands came off the envelope and went behind her back in one motion. She straightened. She stepped back over my legs.

"She came at me, Trent. Look at her."

I said nothing.

Three years I'd been the one who married in. Everything I said got rewound and retold by Sunday. Anything I said in that room belonged to her the second it left my mouth.

So I didn't look at either of them. I looked past Rennie's left shoulder, six feet back, to the serving-counter shelf where my phone sat in a spring clamp, tilted up into the room, screen lit, a red LIVE band across the top and the comment line climbing.

I'd clamped it there at seven o'clock for the trophy handoff because the league likes to watch. Ninety-four people had watched the handoff. I had no idea how many were watching now.

Rennie followed my eyes. She turned her head.

Her mouth opened and nothing came out. Her chin dropped. Her right hand came up off her hip and stopped in the air, fingers spread, halfway to the shelf.

Trent was still looking at her back. He hadn't seen it yet.

I lay there and let him not see it.

At 9:41, Rennie pulled the phone off the clamp, jabbed at it with her thumb, and shoved it in her jacket pocket. She put the envelope in her tote and zipped it.

"Get up," she said. "You're fine. You're dramatic and you're fine."

I got up on my own, off the doorframe, because nobody moved to help me. The mat stayed where it was, under my hip's print in the wax.

At 9:52 she went behind the grill and dropped the phone in the dish sink, which was full of Thursday's cold water and a stack of red plastic cups. I watched her do it through the pass-through window. She held it under with two fingers until the screen went dark, and then she held it under some more.

Trent stood by the register with his arms crossed and his jaw working.

"Just apologize and this goes away," he said.

I walked home in the rain. Eight blocks. My hip was already turning purple under the leggings and I could feel the baby rolling slow and heavy against my ribs, which was the only thing that mattered.

Because the phone was dead and the envelope was gone and Rennie Mabry had never once had the password to the Mabry Lanes page.

I did. I'd had it for two years.

I went to bed with my shoes still on and lay there doing arithmetic in the dark, and the arithmetic said the thing that had been running in that room since seven o'clock was still up on the internet, under my name, waiting for morning.