Every single thing my family dismissed as her being difficult turns out, in the record, to have been her being right. She rented the townhouse because she was right.

She gathered the proof because she was right.

She was afraid because there was something to be afraid of, and the people who told her she was imagining it were, most of them, the thing itself.

She had asked me for help.

On our last call, the last time I heard her voice, she had said I’m afraid, in a small flat voice I had never heard her use — and I, three days from home and full of my own important assignment, had told her not to overreact.

Told her to talk to my mother.

Told her to wait until I got back.

I told my frightened wife to go to the very woman who would lock her door.

Chapter 10 — The Envelope

Odile’s coworker came to the police station the next morning holding an envelope my wife had handed her two days before I got home — handed her, I understood, precisely because Odile had known she might not be able to deliver it herself.