Arthur stared at the phone.
Clare whispered, “Dad, I don’t know who she is.”
From the bedroom, Lily began to cry.
Arthur pushed the door open.
The room was bright enough to hurt his eyes after the dark hallway.
Lily and Noah were huddled together beside Noah’s bed, both still in pajamas.
Noah had one hand wrapped around his toy truck’s missing wheel.
Lily had her arm around him, trying to be brave in the fierce, heartbreaking way little girls try to be adults before their teeth have all come in.
They were alive.
Arthur breathed for the first time since the hospital.
Then he saw the chair beneath the window.
Someone had moved it.
The curtain was wet.
The window latch was unlocked.
Not broken.
Unlocked.
Arthur crossed the room and looked down into the rain-black yard.
The backyard swing Christian had built moved slightly in the storm.
Beyond it, near the tree line, a figure stepped between two pines and disappeared.
Arthur turned back to Clare.
“Get the children,” he said.
His voice came out steady.
That frightened him.
“Shoes. Coats. Now.”
Clare nodded, then froze.
“What about Christian?”
Arthur looked at the envelope in his hand.
For eight years, he had thought Christian was the danger.
He had built all his anger around that certainty.
But Christian was in a hospital bed with poison in his blood, and someone had called Clare from his phone four minutes after the crash.
Someone who knew Arthur had the envelope.
Someone who knew the children’s room.
Someone who had been close enough to leave the front door open by one inch.
Arthur opened the envelope again on Lily’s dresser.
Clare saw the photograph first.
Then the name underneath.
Her face changed slowly.
Recognition did not arrive as a gasp.
It arrived as her whole body going still.
“Clare,” Arthur said.
She put one hand over her mouth.
“That’s not Christian,” she whispered.
“No,” Arthur said.
Her eyes filled.
“I’ve seen that name.”
Arthur felt the house tilt around him.
“Where?”
Clare looked toward the hallway.
Then toward the window.
Then back at her children.
“In our mortgage paperwork,” she said.