“So what broke it?” Cordell asked, though he already knew, because he had watched her do it.

“She did.” Ramsey nodded toward the family room down the hall, where a seven-year-old was asleep in a plastic chair.

“He did everything right, from his point of view.

He controlled the house, he controlled the story, he controlled the timeline.

The one variable he never accounted for was that one of his daughters was watching him more closely than he was watching her — that she’d see enough to know something was wrong, and think to take the proof, and think to hide it where he checked last, and walk her sick sister through the rain to the one place he couldn’t follow.

He planned around two small children as if they were objects in the house.