Part One: Thursday, 6:40 p.m.

I had chocolate bears in my bag.

That is the detail I always start with, because it is the one that took me the longest to be able to say out loud.

There were four of them, in a paper bag from a shop near the hotel in Kansas City, because for six nights my three-year-old had asked me on the phone whether I was bringing the bears, and on the sixth night she had asked twice.

I got into Minneapolis at 5:20 on a Thursday in February.

I picked up my car from the long-stay lot and I drove home with the heater on full and I was in a good mood, because I had closed the thing I had gone there to close and because I was going to be home before her bedtime.

I let myself into the apartment at about twenty to seven.

Nobody came to the door.

The television was on in the living room.

My sister-in-law Brenda was on the sofa with her feet up, looking at her phone.

My father-in-law Raymond was standing at the dining table with a cigarette, which he was not supposed to smoke inside and always did.

My mother-in-law Beatrice was in the kitchen.

“Where’s Daisy?”

Beatrice came out drying her hands on a dish towel and said, “She’s having a think about what she did.”

The balcony door was closed.

There is a sheer curtain across it and it was dark outside, and I saw a shape.

It was eleven degrees that evening.

I looked it up afterward, obsessively, the way you do.