Chapter Fifteen

Valerian Wainscott asked only for tea and honey at the booth in the diner, waiting until after Emily had ordered a chicken salad sandwich and a diet soda to put in her small request.

“That’s all you’re having?” Emily said to the psychiatrist.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Valerian reassured her, and she reached into her handbag on the cushion beside her and pulled out a Ziploc plastic bag filled with granola. “Voilà! My lunch.”

“They don’t mind?”

The woman shrugged and smiled cherubically. “It’s homemade,” she said. Then she removed a black leather portfolio case and opened it on the table between them. On the inside front cover Emily saw a pocket with pages of handwritten notes about her husband. “There’s a lot I want to talk about,” Valerian said. “I have strong opinions about your husband and strong thoughts on how to help him.”

“Go on.” There was no doctor-patient confidentiality. Chip had told Valerian he wanted her to share with Emily whatever Valerian thought his wife should know.

“First of all, I worry that if we don’t, well, get him under control, he may hurt himself.”

“You mean again?” Emily said, seeing once more in her mind the knife in his stomach that night as he had stood at the top of the stairs.

“I mean worse than what was, in essence, an instance of especially violent cutting.”

“You’re suggesting that he might make another attempt to kill himself.”

“Yes.”

Emily sat back against the vinyl cushions and tried to focus. She reminded herself that Valerian was only verbalizing thoughts she had already had and things she and Michael Richmond had discussed. Nevertheless, the reality of her husband’s deteriorating mental state was still hard to hear. “I leave him alone with the girls as little as possible,” she murmured.

“Oh, he would never hurt the girls,” Valerian reassured her. “Never. This isn’t about that.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest he would,” she said. “I just worry that he gets so … so distracted. I just worry that one afternoon Hallie or Garnet might do something dangerous and silly—they’re only ten, after all—and Chip would be completely oblivious.”

“I see.”

“So, tell me: What do you want to do?”

“Well, remember, I am just the second opinion,” Valerian began. “Michael is still his doctor, and he seems perfectly competent in most ways.”

“Go on.”

“But your husband and I are starting to build a good rapport, too. And my sense is that I would like to admit him.”

“Admit him?”

“So we can observe him.”

Abruptly Emily understood what Valerian was telling her, and she felt as if she was on a plane and had just dropped a few thousand feet in sudden turbulence. She felt as if her whole body had lurched, and she was frightened. She heard the clatter of silver and plates and the din of conversation all around her through the thick French drapes of a theater. Everything sounded muffled and far away. “You want him institutionalized?” she asked when the idea had sunk in.

“Just temporarily. And he would have to agree to it. But all those beams that keep a person sane and functioning are about as stressed as they can get without snapping in two. And if they do snap, it won’t be pretty.”

“How long?”

“At the state hospital? I don’t know.”

“Best guess?”

“Maybe a month. Maybe less, maybe more. You both should view it as a time-out from life.”

“Then couldn’t the same effect be achieved with, I don’t know, a really restful vacation?”

“He needs treatment and observation.”

Emily was vaguely aware that the psychiatrist had opened her bag of granola, and now the woman popped a few pieces into her mouth. Her chewing reminded Emily of a rabbit.

“Have you talked to my husband about this?” she asked finally.

“No. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“What about Michael?”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Can you tell me what’s involved?”

“With institutionalization?”

She nodded.

“Since it’s voluntary, it’s mostly about making sure there’s a bed. John Hardin would not even need to help us prepare committal papers.”

In her mind Emily saw her calm and gentle boss. “I keep forgetting: You know John.”

“Like a godfather, Emily. I love that man. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him.”

“Can I think about this?” she asked.

The waitress returned and, smiling, placed the chicken salad sandwich on the table. She was an older woman with bluish hair and large tortoiseshell eyeglasses that dwarfed her nose. She didn’t seem troubled by the idea that Valerian was eating food she had brought from home into the diner, and so Emily reflexively looked at the badge on her smock dress. Maggie. So, the waitress wasn’t one of them. Emily was surprised.

“Of course you can think about it,” the psychiatrist said after Maggie had left them alone. “And I will respect whatever decision you make. Just …”

“Just what?”

She pushed her little bag of granola aside and put her hands on the table, palms open and up. “Give me your hands,” she said to Emily, and—a little reluctantly at first—Emily did. Then Valerian grasped them, gently massaging Emily’s fingers with her thumbs. “I just worry about you. All of us do. We all just worry about you so, so much.”

The cat watched the birds here in New Hampshire, making no distinctions between the ones that she’d stalked in Pennsylvania and the ones that seemed to be everywhere in this new world. There were more of them now that the snow was gone and the days were growing long. She was finding the field grass beyond the greenhouse a considerably better place to stalk them than the manicured lawns around her previous home, even though it was nowhere near as tall as it would be in another month. Unlike other cats, she felt no need to share the remains of her kills with the four people around her. She needed their approval in some ways, but she tended to eat the birds she caught wherever she found them. Same with the field mice and moles.

Likewise, she watched the insects, and was particularly fascinated by the ants that would swarm upon the small pieces of the breads and confections that the people she didn’t know brought into this house. She made no connection between the people and the way some of those foods seemed to poison the ants; that sort of cause-and-effect leap was beyond her.

Among the humans whom she did not view as part of her family but was starting to recognize, there was one with gray hair that was long and thick, and who seemed to bring more food into the house than any of the other strangers. Today she had come by again when only the man was home. It was early in the afternoon, and the girls and their mother had disappeared, as they tended to most days, and the father was working around the first floor of the house. The woman had knelt down in the front hallway and made kissing sounds, and so Desdemona had walked over to her while the father went to retrieve something from the kitchen. She’d pressed her head into the woman’s fingers and the palm of her hand, enjoying the way this individual knew precisely how to rub her ears and scratch her neck. She’d purred.

Then the woman had opened a plastic bag and pulled out a mouse by its tail. It was already dead, and for a moment Desdemona had eyed it carefully. No human had ever given her an animal before. And there was a scent to it that she didn’t recognize. But a mouse was a mouse, and it was fresh. And so she took it and raced into the corner of the den nearest the woodstove. There she devoured every bit of it, despite its unfamiliar but not unappealing flavor, even the tail and the liver and the head.

Michael Richmond hadn’t known Valerian Wainscott well before their meeting that afternoon at his office in Littleton, but their paths had crossed at a pair of conferences and once they had been at a cocktail party together. That was three years ago. Richmond had been struck by her name the moment they’d met, since, he presumed, it signaled that she was a part of that bizarre cult of herbalists centered in Bethel. But she seemed almost too much of a flake to be one of them; moreover, she worked at the state psychiatric hospital. She was a lovely young woman whom he recalled nibbling on a homemade cupcake during a lecture in one conference and whose questions betrayed a deep distaste for most pharmacological interventions in the other—which, he supposed, made her a very rare bird at the hospital. Given how many beds were filled with the mentally ill who were violent or delusional or both, it seemed inconceivable that some days she wouldn’t want to pass out risperidone and valproate like M&M’s on Halloween. The fact was, chamomile tea wasn’t going to sedate a raging schizophrenic.

The two other women Richmond had met who he was convinced were part of the cult were a pair of real estate agents, and they seemed considerably more focused and intense than Valerian. One of them was so preternaturally composed that she was a little intimidating. He had met the two when he’d been searching for a small home near the ski resort. After spending a day looking at property with the composed one, he’d decided to work with another agency—and, eventually, through that firm had found an A-frame with a magnificent view of Cannon Mountain. He couldn’t recall the original real estate agent’s name now, but she had explained to him that it was some rare and exotic flower. Later people would tell him about the strange cult—a coven, they had said, only half-kidding—and he would realize that he had met one of its members.

Well, Dr. Valerian Wainscott was in all likelihood a member, too.

And now she wanted to commit Chip Linton—or, to be precise, recommend to Chip that he commit himself. And while that notion alone had infuriated Michael, he had to admit that he was also annoyed with her presumption that she was better trained than he was to care for “a middle-aged male cutter” like Chip Linton.

“You make it sound like that’s a type,” he had told her, incapable of hiding his incredulity.

“It’s uncommon, but not unseen,” she had replied, her voice downright chipper. “I see men like the pilot at the hospital periodically.”

“You do?”

“Absolutely,” she had assured him.

“Well, he does not need to be committed.”

“Is he getting better with you?”

“He’s making progress.”

“No,” she’d said, her voice pert, “I just don’t see it. And are you really that confident that he won’t kill himself? Tell me: Could you live with yourself if he did?”

“I simply do not believe hospitalization is in his best interests,” he had told her. “I will argue against it. I will tell Emily that her second opinion is a wrong opinion.”

Valerian had smiled and raised her eyebrows and shrugged. He’d decided she was absolutely beautiful and absolutely insane. He’d decided she was completely unqualified to do what she did for a living. And he’d decided he would tell Emily and Chip to give this Valerian Wainscott as wide a berth as they could. They should have nothing to do with her and—if they ever met any others—they should avoid those Bethel women who spent way too much time in their greenhouses.

“I’ll bet your father has finished hanging the wallpaper in the dining room,” Emily told the girls, handing Hallie a half gallon of milk and Garnet a brown paper grocery bag. On the way home from dance class, they had stopped at the supermarket and done the food shopping for the next few days. “I really won’t miss those sunflowers,” she added, trying to sound cheerful. She was looking forward to seeing the room brightened by the new wallpaper patterned with roses, but mostly she was preoccupied with Valerian’s belief that her husband should be institutionalized. She wasn’t sure if she had stopped thinking about it for more than a few minutes since Valerian had rendered her opinion. She wanted to meet with Michael Richmond to see what he thought, and didn’t want to broach the subject with Chip until she knew more.

“Me, either,” Hallie said, leading the way into the house even though she was burdened with the milk, her dance bag, and her school backpack. “They were creepy.”

Emily called out to her husband that they were home, a grocery bag in each arm, figuring in her mind that she had two more trips. “Chip?” she called again when he didn’t respond. She thought she needn’t necessarily worry that he hadn’t answered, but she did.

The three of them went straight to the kitchen, put the bags down on the counter, and then Emily followed the twins as they peered into the dining room. But instead of hearing the girls either coo over the new wallpaper or remark on the reality that there was still a whole section of the west wall with those gloomy, dispiriting sunflowers, she heard Garnet calling out the cat’s name quizzically. “Dessy?” Garnet was saying, her voice not much more than a murmur. “Dessy?” But then the voice grew to one long, loud shriek, and Hallie was wailing the animal’s name, too. There was the family cat on the floor by the credenza—half on the Oriental rug and half on the hardwood planks—her eyes wide open and her tongue protruding like a small pink stone from her mouth. There seemed to be dried froth on her nose and a small stain of dried vomit on the floor beside her.

“Is she dead?” Hallie was asking, trying to sniff back enough of her tears for her words to be clear, and even before Emily had knelt on the floor by the cat and touched the cold fur, she knew that the animal was.

“Chip?” she called again. “Chip?”

“Be right up!” he yelled, his voice somewhere in the basement below them.

“He’s always down there,” Garnet murmured, still crying softly, speaking to no one in particular. She was sitting on the floor and running two fingers gently along the cat’s side. “There, there,” she said, as if the cat were alive and needed comforting. “There, there.”

In a moment Chip was standing in the doorway, his face grimy and his shoulders sagging just a bit, but looking rather cheerful. He had a glass jar in his hands with what looked like soapy water. “Hello, girls,” he said. “I didn’t hear you get home!”

“We were calling for you,” Emily said, trying to read him. “What were you doing?”

“Oh, I was in the basement. I guess I didn’t hear you. I must have been in my own little world.”

“Something’s happened to Desdemona,” she said.

He walked around her and crouched like a baseball catcher between his daughters. He stroked the cat once and then lifted the animal’s head so he could see her dead eyes and the way the tongue protruded from her mouth.

“Oh, Dessy,” he said. Then: “She must have gotten into something. The poor, poor thing.”

“You think she ate something that poisoned her?” she asked him.

“I do. Look at the tongue and look at the vomit.”

“And she’s dead, Daddy?” Hallie asked. “Definitely?”

“Definitely,” he said sadly.

“What’s that in the jar?” Emily asked him.

He looked from the cat to his fingers and seemed surprised to see anything there. Then he shrugged. “Paint thinner. I got tired of wallpapering in here and touched up the trim. I was cleaning the brushes when you got home.”

“In the basement.”

“That’s right,” he said, and once again he stroked the cat behind her ears, the way he had countless thousands of times before. Emily couldn’t imagine why he would have poisoned the cat, but the idea crossed her mind that he had. And then she looked back and forth between her girls, and the notion of her husband taking—to use Valerian’s expression—a time-out from life seemed more and more logical. She decided in the meantime that under no circumstances would she leave him alone with their daughters.

Reseda thought that Sage Messner’s greenhouse—the largest in Bethel and the one the women who did not have greenhouses used—needed statuary. She was watching Anise and Sage work with the twins, and she imagined a marble sculpture of the girls near the parsley, basil, and echinacea. She recalled a Renaissance statue of twin children she had rather liked that she had seen one afternoon on a third-floor corridor at the Uffizi. A cat was rubbing her side against one of the girls’ marble shins, and so Reseda made a mental note to leave out that detail if she should decide to mention the statue to the children. Their cat had died two days earlier, and she knew the loss was still fresh. Right now the twins were standing around a table, hunched over a copy of The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Plants and Herbs, while Anise and Sage stood behind them and pointed out where in the greenhouse they could see the actual plants that were pictured in the text. This was the first of the two-volume encyclopedia that the women used for most of their tinctures, and some approached the book with an almost biblical reverence. There were only four copies of that first volume in the group’s possession, all from 1891, and the women were constantly photocopying pages from it or scanning them into PDFs on their computers, and it was an indication of Anise’s interest in Emily’s daughters that she had shared with them her own personal copy.

Reseda had been about to say something complimentary to the girls about what lovely models for a statue they would make when she paused: She sensed that one of the twins was aware that there was a second volume, and already the child had skimmed through enough of the first book to know its name: The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans. Only a single copy of that second volume existed, and Anise kept it in an ornate, reliquary-like cherry cabinet in her bedroom. Frequently the women searched used bookstores and online auction sites for an additional copy, but one had never appeared. Like their four copies of the first volume, the copyright of the second volume was 1891.

And so instead of making a random suggestion that someday the girls pose for a statue, Reseda said, “I have always preferred this first volume to the second.”

Both girls looked up at her.

“I hadn’t told Cali and Rosemary about the second volume,” Anise said, her tone a little clipped.

“The book talks about it right here,” Garnet said, and she showed Anise and Sage where in the encyclopedia she’d seen that second volume referenced. “See?”

“Aren’t you the diligent student, Cali,” Anise told her.

“What does diligent mean,” Hallie asked, oblivious to the slight edge in Anise’s voice.

“It means she works very, very hard,” Sage explained. “I imagine you do, too.”

“No, she works harder than me,” Hallie said, and she smiled at Garnet with what Reseda knew was genuine sisterly pride. The pride a twin has in her twin. A lover had once told Reseda that he presumed the bonds twins shared far transcended the more common sibling rivalries. He’d been right. “Dad says she’s going to be a teacher or a professor someday.”

“Both are worthy aspirations,” said Anise.

“How is your father?” Reseda asked. She wasn’t as interested in what either child might say as she was in what thoughts would pass through Sage’s head when the woman envisioned Captain Chip Linton. But almost instantly Sage started counting the massive leaves on the hoja santa—which, in a fashion, was itself revealing.

“Mom is a little worried about him, I guess,” Hallie answered, looking down at a diagram of hypnobium in the book rather than meet her gaze.

“We all are,” Sage said.

“Is there anything in particular?” Reseda asked the girl, but carefully she gazed at Garnet as well. “So far, I don’t feel Bethel has been especially healing for him. I know the move to New Hampshire has been hard on all of you.”

“You do?” Garnet asked.

“I do. I really do.”

Garnet seemed to think about this. Then Hallie began to answer: “The other day I caught him talking to someone. I was in the kitchen and Mom was upstairs, and I heard—”

“Hallie!” said her sister, cutting her off, and she took the girl’s arm. “No!”

“It’s Rosemary,” the child snapped. “And, yes, I will tell them! Someone has to know! And just because you don’t want to scare Mom doesn’t mean I can’t talk about it!”

“Go ahead,” Reseda said. “Tell me.”

“The other day I caught him talking to himself,” Hallie said, and then she took a deep breath. “He was in the basement near that weird door, and it was like he was talking to me or Cali. But he wasn’t, because we weren’t with him. We had been upstairs. And another time I found him sitting in the den with my dolls, and it was like he was inventing a game with them for us. But again, he wasn’t. He was all alone.”

“They’re my dolls, too,” Garnet said, and she shook her head.

“And I think …”

“What do you think?” Reseda asked.

“I can tell Mom thinks he might have killed Dessy.”

“Do you think he did?” Sage asked, bending over with her hands on her knees.

“I don’t know. Mom started to say something about maybe taking her body to the veterinarian so he could tell us what happened, but Dad just wanted to bury her. And the ground was just soft enough now that we could.”

“Is there more?” Reseda said.

Hallie nodded. “I guess.”

“Tell me. You can.”

“Well, he’s gone from being kind of spacey since the accident to being really cheerful one second and then really angry the next. But he never gets mad at us. He just gets mad. He also has headaches, and I know they’re getting a lot worse. Mom doesn’t want us to know, but I’ve heard them talking. And he has some really bad pain in his side.”

“He’s depressed,” Anise said. “That’s all. And he should be depressed. What kind of man would your father be, if he weren’t?”

“Is that your way of comforting the children, Anise?” Reseda asked.

“It’s my way of comforting everyone,” she said, and then the whole room seemed to grow quiet, except for the gentle hiss of the humidifier. Sage counted soundlessly, moving her lips, and the girls thought of their father, and Anise merely smirked. And then Garnet’s head cleared, and she looked at all three women around her but directed her question at Reseda.

“Can I ask you something?” the girl said.

“Yes, absolutely.”

“What are the potions in the second volume?”

“I think he did poison that cat,” Anise told Reseda, once Emily had picked up the girls and taken them home. The two of them were walking from Sage’s greenhouse to their vehicles at the edge of the woman’s long driveway. “I think Verbena and the girls will be much, much safer when he is properly hospitalized—as Valerian suggests.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?”

“I don’t see that sort of unreasonable malevolence in the captain. I think the cat just ate something that did her in.”

“I’m not sure Valerian would agree. And she’s the doctor.”

“But she’s not his doctor.”

“She will be.”

“I don’t think a hospital can treat what ails him.”

“And that is?”

Already Reseda regretted saying as much as she had. She didn’t trust Anise. The woman wasn’t necessarily dubious of Reseda’s work as a shaman, but she also craved the tangibility that came with a tincture. She saw magic largely in plants. But, then, Reseda wasn’t fully confident in her own diagnosis, either, since it was based only on very limited observation and what one of the pilot’s daughters had told her. Moreover, she herself had stood in Sawyer Dunmore’s crypt and felt nothing. Nothing at all. It didn’t seem likely the captain was possessed by the Dunmore twin who had been killed. “I’m honestly not sure,” she said finally. “I just don’t think he should be institutionalized.”

Anise shrugged. They had reached her truck, and the rusty front door groaned when she yanked it open. Before climbing in Anise added, “We will do this, Reseda. You know that, don’t you? You can’t stop us. We will try again.”

“Because they’re twins,” she said.

“Yes. And because of what they’ve endured.”

“Do you know which one?”

“I don’t. Not yet. But I will.”

“No good ever comes from that second volume.”

“Not true,” Anise said, settling into her seat and staring down at Reseda from the full height of the truck cab. “I may be vegan, but just the other day I whipped up something absolutely magic with a field mouse.” Then she turned the key and the engine roared to life. She barely missed Reseda’s toes as she sped down the driveway.

“He simply doesn’t agree that hospitalization is the right course,” Valerian told John Hardin, as they sat across from each other at his kitchen table. “I don’t know Michael well, but I know his type.”

“Even after the captain killed the girls’ cat?” John asked, sipping his coffee. He could tell that Valerian, like his wife, did not approve of coffee. But he viewed it as his only vice. Besides, he had yet to find a tea he enjoyed half so much. “He really doesn’t think the man poses some sort of danger to his family?”

“So it would seem. But, then, he doesn’t believe the captain poisoned the animal.”

“Well, Verbena does.”

“And that’s something. Nevertheless, he called me today to tell me he’s going to report me to the State Board of Medicine. He’s going to suggest that I have some … some sort of agenda … for wanting the man committed.”

“Well, you do,” John said, and he allowed himself a small smirk. As he hoped, it seemed to cheer the young woman a bit. “So, hospitalization isn’t really the recommended protocol?”

“Of course not!”

“No arguable gray area?”

“None.”

“Well, you’re the doctor. I’m merely a lawyer. But sadly, in addition to getting you in a wee bit of hot water, this could be a bit of a cause célèbre, couldn’t it? Given the captain’s history and that ditching in Lake Champlain, arguing over his competency could draw more attention to us than any of us desire.”

“I know.”

“Tell me: In your opinion, would Verbena be able to convince the captain to admit himself to the hospital if Michael were no longer his physician?”

“Absolutely,” she answered. “I have no doubt.”

“So we need Michael gone.”

“Yes, but we really don’t have the time to convince him to … take care of himself.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter because I’m not much of a sorcerer. Just had the good sense to marry one. Besides: It’s not as if Anise has managed to convince the captain to take care of himself.”

“These things take time. And unfortunately, I really don’t have a lot of it.”

“Everything is so much easier once the captain is committed. Verbena is dependent upon us and enamored with us. There’s a term for that, isn’t there? A psychological term?”

She nodded. “The Stockholm syndrome. It’s when a captive or a hostage starts thinking well of his or her abductors.”

“Well, I like to believe she would think highly of us no matter what. I think most of the time we’re rather good eggs.”

“John, sometimes I just can’t tell when you’re pulling my leg or being deadly serious.”

He reached across the table and squeezed her arm. “This time? I am being deadly serious,” he answered, smiling, and his eyes had the twinkle she loved.

That night Emily skimmed through the local phone book. Even though it was but a fraction as thick as the one back home in Pennsylvania, there were still nearly two columns of people named Davis. Fortunately, there were only two in Bethel and only one Rebecca. Paul and Rebecca Davis. Clearly this was the woman who had buttonholed her at the diner in Littleton soon after they arrived in New Hampshire. While the girls were doing their homework she phoned her. That afternoon, Anise and Sage had each tried calling her Verbena, just as John Hardin had earlier in the week. Meanwhile, Valerian Wainscott wanted to institutionalize her husband. And so now Emily decided that she needed another opinion about these self-proclaimed herbalists. She wanted to speak with someone who, clearly, wasn’t one of them.

A man answered the phone at the Davis household, and she introduced herself to him. She said she was Emily Linton and she was hoping to speak to Becky Davis. Although she was quite sure she heard the woman in the background speaking with that high school–age son she had mentioned at the diner, Paul Davis said his wife wasn’t home. But he said that she would call Emily back in the next day or two.

“Would you like my work number?” she asked.

“We know your firm,” he said, an edge to his voice that hadn’t existed when he first answered the call.

“That’s right,” Emily said simply. “Your wife mentioned that she knew I worked with John Hardin.”

“We all do,” he told her, and then added curtly, “Good night.”

You wonder: These days, does Emily ever fall into a sleep so deep that she will not remember her dreams in the morning and no mere rustle will wake her? You know what she thinks about you. You know what they all think. The women. Their husbands. You know what they all believe.

The truth is, now whenever you climb from beneath the sheets—before you have even thrown your feet over the side of the bed onto the cold wooden floor of your bedroom—Emily is awake.

Chip? she will murmur, and then she will ask you where you are going.

Oh, just getting an Advil, you will reassure her, and sometimes that has indeed been the case, because sometimes Ethan or Ashley or even Sandra has joined you in your bedroom in those smallest, darkest hours of the night. Other times you have simply gone to the bathroom. Either way, Emily will sit upright in bed and await your return. You know she is listening carefully to the sound of your footsteps along the corridor and awaiting the sound of the bathroom door closing and opening. If your toes so much as touched the steps to the third floor and Hallie and Garnet’s bedrooms, she would be out of your bed like a shot.

The result is that those same demons that have you contemplating the deaths of your own children have you contemplating her death as well. She has no idea that you have brought Tansy’s knife upstairs, none at all. Right now, you could lie on your stomach and drape your arm over the side of the mattress, dangle it casually as if you were getting a massage, and find the knife held to the inside wall of a horizontal slat with one wide piece of duct tape. Or you could simply smother Emily. The original Desdemona—Shakespeare’s, not yours—died that way. And, in fact, your Emily once played Desdemona and she was remarkable. You were able to rearrange your flight schedule that month so you could be in the audience opening night, and you may never have been more proud of her as an actress than when you witnessed her final scene with Othello. You watched her die at the hands of her husband.

You have to hope it will never come to that in real life. You have to hope you can resist. But the physical pains grow worse, as does Ethan’s incessant prodding. If you ever hurt either Emily or your girls, you know that next you would kill yourself. That has always been clear.

And so once more you contemplate the knife you have brought to your bed. Perhaps you should simply use it upon yourself first and ensure that nothing happens to Emily or Hallie or Garnet. This time, instead of plunging it into your abdomen—trying, in some way, to eradicate the pain you already are feeling—you should slash your wrists. Long cuts along your forearms, from your elbows to the wrinkles at the palms of your hands.

“Chip?”

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Were you having a bad dream? One of your plane dreams?”

“No. I wasn’t even asleep. I was wide awake.”

“You were?”

“I was.” You pull your legs out from under the sheets and feel her sit up in bed. You knew she would.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“Just getting an Advil.”

And then you walk to the bathroom, leaving the door open so she can hear exactly what you are doing. She can hear the mirrored cabinet door with its small squeal and she can hear the rattle of the red pills in the plastic bottle when you shake three more tablets (yes, that is how many you will take now; sometimes you even take four) into the palm of your hand. When you return to bed, her head is on her pillow, but you can tell that her eyes are open. She is alert. Vigilant. But, of course, she is not as vigilant as she thinks she is. She has no idea that on the other side of the bed—her side of the bed—Ethan Stearns is watching her. He is watching you both. And your head? It now feels like it will explode, and, despite those three Advil, you shut tight your eyes against the pain, grimacing into your pillow in the dark.