Two blocks from his house, Marcus told the driver to pull over.

He sat in the back of the stopped car, on a quiet Greenwich street, and he canceled his flight, and then he made a phone call.

His hands, now that Sarah could not see them, were not quite steady.

But his mind was very clear.

He did not call the police first.

This is a thing he thought about carefully, even in those first frantic minutes, and it is a measure of the man that he got it right.

He knew that a father storming back into the house shouting accusations, with nothing but a child’s whispered words, could accomplish nothing except to warn his enemy and, worse, to put his daughter in the middle of a screaming confrontation.