She had recorded it, laughing.

It was all, I understood now, one thing: not a marriage in which a cruel man had a passive wife, but a partnership, an enterprise, two people who had spent years stealing together and would, it turned out, do violence together to protect what they had stolen.

That same afternoon, a vase of flowers arrived at my hospital room, with no card.

Tucked into the arrangement was an unsigned note, typed on plain paper: Stop asking questions if you want to stay alive. The detectives took it for prints.