Emily’s body went to the medical examiner’s office that afternoon.

Nathan was not arrested that day.

That surprised Margaret, and Michael explained it to her in a parking lot in a way she has since repeated to a great many people: you do not arrest a man on the day of his wife’s funeral on the strength of a bruise.

You take the body, you freeze the estate, you get the phone records, and you build it.

What Michael did do, before he left, was this.

He came out of the family room and found Margaret in the vestibule with Sophie holding onto her leg, and he saw the way Nathan Brooks was looking at his own daughter from thirty feet away.