Chapter 1 — Click

The nightmare didn’t begin with a shout or a slammed door.

It began with a sound so small I almost missed it, standing at the island of our Chicago penthouse after a fourteen-hour day, stirring a pot of marinara I wasn’t really watching.

Click.

It was the deadbolt on the heavy oak kitchen door.

My mother-in-law, Eleanor Caldwell, had crossed the room and slid it home, and now she stood with her back to it, her hands folded, watching me the way you watch a thing you have already decided about.

“Eleanor,” I said, and I heard the unease climb into my own voice.

“Why did you lock the door?” She didn’t answer.

Her eyes had gone past me, to the narrow glass panel beside the doorframe, and I followed them, and there in the dim dining room stood my husband, Nathan.

He was not frightened.

He was not confused.

He drew back the cuff of his custom suit, checked his watch as though we were running behind on something scheduled, and then he looked directly at his mother, and he nodded.

One small deliberate movement.

And in that nod I understood, all at once and far too late, that the warm careful marriage I had been living inside for three years was a room with a lock on it, and that the two people I had trusted most in the world had been standing on the other side of the door the entire time, waiting for a signal.

I did not scream.

I want you to remember that about me, because everything that came after depended on it.

I went still, and I went cold, and somewhere underneath the fear a much older part of me woke up and began, very quietly, to count exits.

It was the nod that told me the truth, more than the lock.