Chapter 4

Nobody slept in that house.

At ten, Corinne left in her Subaru, headlights cutting through the rain down the hill. At eleven, Seth went up. At midnight, Glen started calling out from his room-not words, just sound, the low unhappy sound he made when his body wanted the thing it wasn't getting.

I sat on the floor of the hallway with my back against the wall and my hand around my wrist, and I listened to my father-in-law ask for someone who wasn't there, and I did the math.

Three sedatives missing over three days. Three nights Glen had gotten up. Three nights I had gotten up with him.

Somebody needed Glen to look like he was getting worse.

Somebody needed me to look like I was the reason.

At one in the morning I got up and went down the back stairs, past the kitchen, out through the mudroom in my socks, and across to the farm office. The rain had stopped and the dooryard was one sheet of ice. Twice I went down on my hands and knees, and twice I got up.

The office door wasn't locked. Corinne kept it locked; that was the whole point of the key ring she carried. But the lock hadn't caught, and the door swung when I leaned on it.

Inside it smelled like paper and cold coffee. The desk lamp had a rotary switch and I turned it all the way down before I flipped it.

The landline was there, the old black one with a cord, the only phone in the house that didn't live in somebody's pocket.

I dialed Glen's doctor and got the night service and left a message that was shaking the whole time, and then I hung up and I looked at the desk.

There was a folder on it. Manila, soft at the corners. On the front, in Corinne's handwriting, two words: TILDEN - EXECUTION.

Inside, a single page, in the machine's font, with lines for signatures.

DECEMBER 22, 2024, 9:00 A.M. - NOTARY: D. PRESCOTT.

That was the man. That was the business. Tomorrow morning, nine o'clock.

I stood there with the page in my hands and tried to make myself understand what I was looking at, and I couldn't, because there was nothing on it I recognized. It was all unfamiliar words. It was all somebody else's plan.

Above my head, Seth's footsteps creaked across the ceiling of the office. He was awake. He was walking.

I put the folder back exactly the way I'd found it and shut off the lamp and went out through the mudroom and up the back stairs, and I made it to the landing before I heard a small voice in the dark.

"Mama."

Micah was sitting on the top step in his pajamas, hugging his knees. He was supposed to be asleep. He'd gotten out of bed and found me gone and done what he always did when he was scared, which was wait, which was the part of him I recognized, because I'd taught it to him.

"Come here," I whispered, and he came and climbed into my lap, all elbows.

"I have a secret radio," he said.

"I know. It's in the hutch."

He shook his head against my chest. He shook it hard.

"Not that one," he said.

I went very still.

"Then which one, baby?"

He wouldn't say. He said the bad man was listening. He said the thing talks.

"It says the bad thing, Mama," he whispered. "It says what Nana said."

Down the hall, Seth's door opened. Floorboards creaked toward the stairs.

I put my hand over my son's mouth, gentle, and I held him, and we sat in the dark and listened to my husband come looking for us.