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door on the question, just as hehad slammed the door shut on the artists’ loft with a harbor view in Red Hook …
     … oh, hell, Susan, you don’t need that place anymore, you got this place, remember?
    This thought, vaguely comforting though it was, led her back along her twisting maze of anxiety, to yet more things that needed to be done: find out when recycling goes out, find a nonfilthy Laundromat—no washer/dryer, remember?—look into preschool programs for Emma for January—she had secured a slot at a well-regarded place in the Flatiron District, but now Susan had wrenched up the family and moved them here,
for no reason, for no good reason …
    Susan sat up, panting, clutching a hand to her chest. “Shit,” she said to the darkness.
    The bedside clock read 2:34. Susan rose, stepped into the bathroom, and took the other half of the Ambien.
    *
    Reluctant to return to bed, Susan turned the other way out of the bathroom, slipped past the linen closet, and creaked open the door of Emma’s new room. Looking down at the peaceful, sleeping figure of her daughter, Susan felt almost unbearably in love with her. Emma’s little chest rose and fell, rose and fell. She had her father’s thick dark hair and big brown eyes, but her small frame and sometimes-playful/sometimes-hesitant spirit were all Susan.
    “Oh, sweet pea,” she murmured. Gingerly she eased the covers down from where Emma had tugged them up under her chin. She insisted on being tucked in so tightly, even in the late-summer heat.
    Then Susan glanced at the window and gasped. “Oh God!
Oh
my God!
” she said, loudly, scaring herself in the quiet dark of the bedroom.
    Emma stirred but didn’t wake. Susan stepped closer to the window and gaped, wide-eyed, at where a person, or the shadow of a person, was standing in the backyard, leaning against the rickety back fence and staring up. The man was massive. In his hand was the long barrel of a gun, or some kind of club, or … 
something …
in the darkness, from this distance, it was impossible to say.
    “Alex!” Susan shouted, but he didn’t answer. Susan’s heart was knocking at her ribs, and she clutched at the windowsill. “
Alex!
God damn it,
Alex!
”
    Emma shifted and moaned in her sleep. Susan opened her mouth to scream again—she would have to go in there and shake him awake. But then she looked again, and there was nothing—no one—in the yard.
    Whatever Susan had seen, or thought she had seen, it was gone.

4.
    On Monday morning, exhausted from her nocturnal adventure and the fitful sleep that had followed, Susan sipped her coffee and scrolled through headlines on her iPhone while Emma toyed with her breakfast. When the nanny rang the bell at 8:50, a full twenty minutes late, Susan walked briskly down the hall to let her in, and a moment later Emma hopped down from the kitchen chair and flew into her arms.
    “Marni! Marni! We live in
this
house now!”
    “I know, buddy,” said Marni, and swept the little girl up, mouthing “I am so sorry” to Susan over Emma’s shoulder. Susan smiled forgivingly, boiling inside. Marni only worked from 8:30 until 2:30, and Susan counted on those hours, especially during a week like this one, when she had a million and a half things to do.
    “The subways totally threw me for a loop,” Marni apologized. “The Internet said it’d take me twenty-three minutes to get here, but it was at least twice that.”
    “That stinks,” said Susan evenly, thinking
Wow, the Internet was wrong. Never could have been predicted
.
    “Hey, the new place looks great,” said Marni, and Emma dragged her by the hand to show her around.
    Marni was a doctoral student in psychology at Fordham, finishedwith her coursework but still writing her dissertation, with mornings free and a need for extra cash. She had been working for them only about seven months—and had agreed, to Susan’s mild chagrin, to stay in the job after their move. Marni’s seeming inability to