I looked at Wendy.

And I watched it arrive.

She had been standing with one hand on the back of my armchair, and she went very still, and her face did something I had never seen a human face do — a kind of sequential collapse, one thing at a time, as her mind ran the timeline and put a girl coming home hysterical at four o’clock next to a motel walkway at three-thirty.

“Chloe,” she said.