Chapter 2

Corinne was already in the barn.

She'd set Glen's pill box on the wreath bench in front of her, open, and she was snapping the little lids down one at a time like she was counting out a debt.

"Monday's empty," she said. "Tuesday's empty. Wednesday's empty."

"I know. I logged it."

"You logged it." She said it the way you'd repeat a lie back to a child.

The barn smelled like pine sap and wet wool and the kerosene heater she never turned up past low. Sleet hammered the metal roof. I put my hand on the organizer.

"Take your hand off," I said.

"Tell me where they went."

"I'm asking you the same thing."

Her phone rang on the bench. Seth. She answered it with her free hand and put it to her ear, and her voice went smooth as butter.

"I've got her in the barn," she said. "She's stealing his meds-I caught her."

I heard Seth's voice on the other end, not the words, just the shape of them.

"No," Corinne said. "No. Let her fall."

Then she grabbed my wrist and slammed it down onto the bench.

The organizer jumped and skittered. Pain shot up my arm and my knees went out from under me, and I came down hard on the wet concrete with my shoulder, my free hand scrabbling for the box. I got my arm around it and pulled it against my chest.

Corinne came down over me. One knee on the floor, one hand still crushing my wrist flat against the bench, her face so close I could see the little broken veins in her cheeks and smell her peppermint gum.

"Stay down," she said. "Stay down and it's easier."

My boots scraped. Freezing rain ticked on the roof. Somewhere out in the dark, a power line sighed and the bulb overhead flickered, and in that flicker I saw her eyes, and there was nothing in them at all.

"She's stealing his meds-I caught her," she said again, louder, and I understood she wasn't talking to me anymore. She was talking to the doorway.

Micah was standing in it.

His red snowsuit was dark at the knees from the dooryard. His blue mittens were wrapped around the walkie-talkie. The little red light on the side of it was blinking.

Corinne saw it.

I saw her see it. That was the thing that froze her-not me, not the pill box, not the sound of Seth's truck pulling into the dooryard. Her hand loosened on my wrist, one finger at a time, like a knot she'd decided to untie.

Micah's thumb was on the talk button. He didn't know what he was doing. He was five and he was scared and he pressed it the way he pressed everything.

The toy coughed static into the cold air.

And then Corinne's own voice came out of it, thin and tinny and too calm. "...let her fall."

She went white. Her mouth opened. She turned her whole body toward the doorway, knee lifting off the floor, hand coming up.

Behind me, boots stopped on the concrete.

Seth's voice came from the dark end of the barn, flat and unhurried.

"Where's her phone?"

Nobody moved.

My son stood in the door with the toy in his hands, and my husband stood behind me in the dark, and neither of them was looking at the other.

Seth wasn't looking at me either. He hadn't asked if I was all right. He hadn't asked about the blood I could feel beading on my elbow. He hadn't asked anything about me at all.

He'd asked about my phone.

I curled the organizer tighter against my chest and said nothing, and that was the first time I understood that the man who'd come in to rescue me had come in for something else.

Corinne was still turning toward my son.