Chapter 3
I watched her face on the porch camera feed change from confusion to something colder. Not guilt exactly — fear, I would understand later, because she had genuinely not sent that second message and had no idea who had, and was standing on her own front porch trying to calculate, in real time, which version of disaster she was currently inside of.
"Leave," she said. "Right now."
"Your husband is gone, isn't he?"
That was when the dark SUV turned into the driveway.
Rebecca Mercer stepped out still wearing her office badge, clutching a folder against her chest. She looked at Claire. She looked at Ryan. She looked at the front door of my house.
"No," she said. "Please tell me this isn't true."
I got out of my truck and crossed the street.
I want to walk through what happened in the next twenty minutes carefully, because it is the part of this story that actually mattered, more than the trap itself, more than the headlights and the porch camera and the careful three weeks of preparation.
"Adam," Claire said, seeing me approach. Her voice had the particular pitch of someone watching two separate catastrophes merge into one. "I didn't send that message. I swear to you, I didn't invite him here."
"I know," I said. "I sent it."
May you like
It took her a full three seconds to process that sentence. I watched it land — the specific vertigo of learning that the trap you've just been caught in was built by the person standing in front of you, not the person you'd been afraid of.
"You knew," she said. "You knew about—" She stopped.
