The weeping had been a script.

The collapse over our lost children had been a performance, all of it staged for one purpose: to get a grieving, harmless-seeming husband past the police officers stationed outside my door, and alone into my room, so that he could do the thing he had come to do.

He had not come to mourn.

He had come to make certain that the witness to his crime did not live to testify.

And the blackout, that random failure of the hospital’s power, had handed him the cover of darkness at exactly the moment he needed it.