Part One

Chapter 1 — The Quiet House

The house was too quiet when I came in at half past four on a damp Tuesday. Usually the hallway carried the whole racket of the afterschool routine — a backpack hitting the floor, the heavy, happy thump of paws running toward me.

Today there was only a dense silence hanging over the foyer, and it made me stop where I stood.

It was not my foyer. I want to be accurate about that, because it matters later and because at the time I had stopped noticing. It was Arthur and Martha’s house, and had been since Lia was seven — four years and two months of my mother-in-law’s hallway, my mother-in-law’s china, my mother-in-law’s Sundays.

“Lia, honey, are you home?” I called, dropping my keys into the glass bowl on the side table. “I got out of the office early.”

No answer. Then a small rustle near the landing drew my eyes up to the dark stairwell. My eleven-year-old daughter stood in the shadows at the top of the stairs, thin and still against the pale wallpaper, her school uniform rumpled and twisted like she’d been sitting curled up for hours.

“Lia, what’s wrong?” I took two quick steps toward the banister. “Why are you standing in the dark?”

She came forward into the weak light from the hall window, and I caught my breath. Her eyes were swollen and red, her cheeks streaked with dried tears.

She’d been crying long enough to lose her voice, and her hands were clenched white at her sides.

“Mom,” she managed, in a rasp that barely sounded like her.

“Oh, sweetheart — what happened?” I went up the stairs two at a time, my heart slamming. “Are you hurt?”

She didn’t answer. She turned, slow and stiff, and pointed at her bedroom door.