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sex with her. He went, though he didn’t realize it then . . . he went on the chance of feeling flattered again. Maybe he’d hear portions of their research interview underpinning her prose, or maybe he’d find that her book contained a character like himself, or a better version of himself. Maybe he’d just get the chance to give her some criticism on her writing while she listened to him, all serious and sophisticated and doe-eyed the way she was.
    He did not go to have sex with her, but he didn’t tell his wife he was going to see her either. So later, he understood that Margo had played him expertly and that he had been a country fool, two acres dumber than dirt.
    Of course, there had been no reading. There was no novel, as he later came to believe. He was the novel. He was the story she was telling herself. Margo—as he now understood her—was a fantasist and a manipulator. The emotionally disturbed daughter of a wealthy businessman, she was spoiled, unemployable, and idle, nothing but time on her hands. Most of that time she spent on the Internet. She had been taken with him, charmed by his famous picture, and had conceived this romantic drama for them to play out.
    The café was closed when he got there. She was waiting for him on the sidewalk outside. She had some long excuse about why the reading had been canceled at the last minute. This included a story about why she needed a ride home. Which, of course, he gave her.
    By then, he should have been suspicious about who she was and what she was—even more so after he saw the house she lived in. It was nearly a mansion to his eyes, with acres of landscaped garden in front of it and a local forest preserve stretching down into a gorge behind. But she asked him to come in with her until she got the lights turned on, and then she pretended to be upset about the canceled reading so he stayed for a drink. Until the moment he felt the shocking satin of her skin beneath his hand and the shocking sweetness of her kiss against his lips, he had imagined he was a man more or less in control of himself.
    Tonight, after he read his son a story and sang his daughter a song, he sat at the kitchen counter with a beer. He watched his wife finish cleaning the kitchen, and he told her about his day. She had advised him to do this—to tell her—from the start of their marriage. She had warned him not to become one of those cops who keeps the horrors of the job to himself—either out of some misguided sense of chivalry, or out of the conviction that no civilian could possibly understand—and so ultimately becomes more intimate with his partner than his spouse. He didn’t give her all the gory details, but he told her about the murder house and about the child in the hidey-hole and about the nearly unbelievable possibility that Dominic Abend had at last made a fatal error.
    â€œY’all aren’t thinking he was there himself, are you?” she asked. “At the murder? Himself?”
    Grace was standing at the sink polishing the spots off a glass with a dish towel. Her hair was shorter now than when they’d met, but there was still a spill of honeyed ringlets over her round cheeks. Her eyes were still a church girl’s eyes, bright and full of faith in heaven and earth and, yes, in him, her husband. Zach knew full well that no one was innocent, no one was pure, but he couldn’t stop feeling that she was, she was. This willingness of hers to take an interest in his world of unholy bloodshed and wickedness—it was so touching to him that he wanted to . . . to more than make love to her, to meld her with himself, to protect her by making her part of his own strength and indestructibility. He wished he had died—died—before he had ever laid eyes on Margo Heatherton.
    â€œNow why would he go and do that?” Grace wondered, still shining the glass absently. “Why wouldn’t he just send his