Chapter 1

The third sedative vanished from Glen's pill box on a Tuesday, and I knew before Corinne did. That should have been my first warning.

I found it at 6:40 in the morning, at the kitchen counter, my hands still cold from the woodpile. The seven-day organizer sat open under the hood light, each compartment labeled in Corinne's tight handwriting. I did what I did every morning: popped the row, counted what was there against what was supposed to be.

Monday's evening slot held one white tablet. It should have held two. Tuesday, the same. Wednesday, the same.

My pencil stub lived in my apron pocket, a leftover from the feed store. I flipped over last week's hardware receipt and wrote the numbers down. Eighteenth. Nineteenth. Twentieth. One short each.

Three days. Three missing.

"Josie."

I closed the organizer before I turned around.

Glen was in his chair by the wood stove, a plaid blanket over his knees, watching sleet hit the window like it was television. He'd been up since five. Most mornings he didn't have my name anymore, but he always knew when something in a room had changed.

"Morning, Glen."

"Not the pills," he said. Clear as a bell, that one sentence.

"I know."

Micah was up too, because the ice had closed the preschool, and he was running his blue walkie-talkie along the back of the couch, whispering into it. He'd gotten the pair for his birthday in July and called them his secret radios. One lived in the kitchen junk drawer. One lived in his snowsuit pocket, which was the only reason I let him keep it, because he got cold hands otherwise.

"Micah. Toast."

"I'm spying, Mama."

"Spy with your mouth full."

Seth came down at seven with his hair still flat and his phone in his hand. He didn't say good morning to Glen. He said the truck was making a noise, and then he saw the organizer open on the counter, and something in his face closed like a door.

"You counting pills again?"

"I'm counting the missing ones."

"Josie." He poured coffee. "He drops them. He hides them under his blanket. You know that."

"Three nights in a row?"

He shrugged, which was his whole vocabulary some mornings. "You're tired. You're five months pregnant. Maybe you miscounted."

I smoothed the receipt flat with two fingers. I had dates.

"If you've got a problem with how his pills are run," he said, "take it up with Ma."

That was the sentence. Everything in this house had a funnel, and the funnel was Corinne.

She arrived at nine, after the roads got bad, in her quilted vest with the hood up and an order sheet tucked under her arm. She lived a quarter mile down the hill, in the old sugarhouse she'd fixed up after Seth's father died. She walked in without knocking, kissed Micah's head, glanced at Glen like he was furniture, and lifted the organizer off the counter before I could get my hand on it.

"Josie's worried about the sedatives," Seth said from the table, not looking up.

"Are you." Corinne turned the box in her hands, counting compartments the way other people counted money. Fast. Without checking the labels.

"Three missing," I said. "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday."

"Monday's missing too," she said.

I hadn't said Monday.

I didn't say anything. That was the trap. She watched me not say it, and I watched her watch me.

"Glen's been up at night," Corinne said. "You've been up with him. That's how it goes when you take on a job like this." She said job like it was a word she'd picked off the floor. "Maybe it's time we looked at help."

"I am the help."

"And look at you." Her eyes went to my middle, five months along and impossible to hide in a flannel that didn't fit anymore. "You've got your own to worry about."

She set the organizer back on the counter, closed, and slid it two inches toward herself.

"Somebody's coming in the morning," she said. "Nine sharp. I want the barn cleared and the office straight."

"Who's coming?"

"Business."

Seth didn't look up from his phone. That was how I knew he already knew.

At three-forty, Corinne came back from the barn and told me the wreath order for the inn was short fourteen. She wanted them done tonight, storm or no storm. I pulled on my coat. Glen was dozing in his chair. Micah was on the floor with his walkie-talkie, lying flat like a soldier.

"Stay inside," I told him. "Mama's going to the barn."

"Okay," he said, in the voice he used when he meant no.

I should have made him say it twice.

The freezing rain had glazed the dooryard into a mirror, and the wind off the tree fields smelled like pine and iron. Halfway to the barn, I heard something small crunch behind me and told myself it was ice coming off the eaves.

It wasn't. But I didn't turn around. I had Glen's medication log folded in my apron, and Corinne's voice in my head, and I was already rehearsing the sentence I'd say when I opened the door.