A kitchen is supposed to be the one room you know by heart — where your hand finds the drawer in the dark, where the light falls the same way every evening, where nothing can surprise you because you have stood in it ten thousand times.

That was what frightened me most in those first minutes, before I had any word for it: not that something dangerous had entered the house, but that the danger was wearing the house’s own ordinary face, my husband’s hands, my mother’s blue plate, the familiar rattle of the freezer, so that I could not point to the wrong thing because the wrong thing was everywhere and looked exactly like home.

Chapter 3 — The Folder

It was Noah who brought up the folder.