She’s searching for something. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. It’s not the expression of someone casually scrolling through emails in the middle of the night. It’s the look of someone on a mission.

  On the other side of the house, another light appears.

  The bedroom.

  Sheer white curtains cover the tall windows. Through them, I see the diffuse glow of a bedside lamp and the silhouette of Tom Royce sitting up in bed. He slides out from under the covers and, wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms, takes a few stiff-jointed steps across the room.

  At the slice of door that’s visible, Tom pauses, just like he did in the dining room when I watched them yesterday.

  He’s listening again, wondering what his wife is up to.

  Two rooms away, Katherine continues to type, read, type. I move back and forth between the two of them, like someone watching a tennis match.

  Tom still listening at the bedroom door.

  Katherine’s face lit by the laptop’s glow.

  Tom slipping out of the room.

  Katherine leaning forward slightly, getting a better look at the computer screen.

  Tom reappearing in the doorway behind her.

  He says something, alerting Katherine to his presence.

  She jolts at the sound of his voice, slams the laptop shut, whirls around to face him. Although I can only see the back of her head, it’s clear she’s speaking. Her gestures are big, demonstrative. A pantomime of innocence.

  Tom says something back, chuckles, scratches the back of his neck. He doesn’t appear angry or even suspicious, which means Katherine must have said the right thing.

  She stands and kisses Tom the same way a sitcom wife would. Perched on tiptoes for a quick peck, one leg bent back in a flirty kick. Tom hits the light switch by the door, and the office becomes a rectangle of blackness.

  Two seconds later, they’re back in the bedroom. Tom climbs into bed and rolls onto his side, his back to the window. Katherine disappears into the bathroom. There’s another flash of perfect lighting, followed by the door closing.

  In the bed, Tom rolls over. The last thing I see is him reaching for the bedside lamp. He turns it off and the house is plunged into darkness.

  I lower the binoculars, unnerved by what I just saw, although I can’t articulate why. I want to think it stems from getting another unfiltered glimpse of someone else’s life. Or maybe it’s simply guilt over convincing myself it was okay to yet again watch something I was never supposed to see. As a result, I’m turning what I saw into something bigger than it really is. The proverbial mountain out of a molehill.

  Yet I can’t shake the way Katherine reacted the moment she realized Tom had entered the room.

  Lifted out of her chair.

  Panic writ large on her face.

  The more I think about it, the more certain I am that she’d been caught looking at something she didn’t want Tom to see. The way she slammed the laptop shut made that abundantly clear, followed up with the too-cutesy kiss.

  It all leads me to one conclusion.

  Tom Royce has a secret.

  And I think Katherine just discovered what it is.

  One a.m.

  Porch, rocking chair, booze, etc.

  I’m half asleep in the chair, doing that dozing-until-your-head-droops-and-wakes-you-up thing my father used to do when I was a kid. I’d watch it happen as the two of us sat in front of the TV, waiting for my mother to get home from a performance. First the eyes would slide shut. Then came stillness and maybe some growl-like snoring. Finally his head would tilt forward, startling him awake. I’d chuckle, he’d mumble something, and the whole process would begin again.

  Now it’s me doing it, the traits of the father passed on to his daughter. After another bob-and-wake, I tell myself it’s time to go to bed.

  But then a light blinks on at the Royce house on the other side of the lake.

  The kitchen.

  Suddenly wide-awake, I fumble for the binoculars, not even thinking about resisting this time. I simply grab them, lift them to my eyes, and see Katherine march into the kitchen. The robe she’d been wearing earlier is gone, replaced by jeans and a bulky white sweater.

  Tom’s right behind her, still in pajama bottoms, talking.

  No.

  Shouting.

  His mouth is wide open, an angry oval that expands and contracts as he keeps yelling at his wife in the middle of the kitchen. She whirls around, shouts something back.

  I lean forward, ridiculously, as if I’ll hear what they’re saying if I get just a little bit closer. But the Royce house is like a silent movie playing just for me. No voices. No music. No sound at all save for the ambient noise of the wind in the leaves and the lapping of water along the shore.

  Katherine enters the darkened dining room, nothing but a faint shadow passing the floor-to-ceiling windows. Tom trails a few paces behind her, following her as she disappears into the living room.

  For a moment, there’s nothing. Just the steady glow of the kitchen light, illuminating an empty room. Then a living room lamp is turned on. Tom’s doing. I see him on the white sofa, one hand retracting from the freshly lit lamp. Katherine stands at the window, back turned to her husband, looking directly across the lake to my house.

  Like she knows I’m watching.

  Like she’s certain of it.

  I slide deeper into the rocking chair. Again, ridiculous.

  She can’t see me.

  Of course she can’t.

  If anything, I suspect she’s watching her husband’s reflection in the glass. On the edge of the couch, he slumps forward, head in his hands. He looks up, seemingly pleading with her. His gestures are desperate, almost frantic. By focusing on his lips, I can almost make out what he’s saying.

  How? Or maybe Who?

  Katherine doesn’t reply. At least not that I can see. Away from the couch and backlit by the lamp, the front of her is cast in shadow. She’s not moving, though. That much I can tell. She stands mannequin-like in front of the window, arms at her sides.

  Behind her, Tom rises from the couch. The pleading morphs into shouting again as he takes a halting step toward her. When Katherine refuses to respond, he grabs her arm and jerks her away from the glass.

  For a second, her gaze stays fixed on the window, even as the rest of her is being pulled away from it.

  That’s when our eyes lock.

  Somehow.

  Even though she can’t see me and my eyes are hidden behind binoculars and we’re a quarter mile apart, our gazes find each other.

  Just for a moment.

  But in that tiny slice of time, I can see the fear and confusion in her eyes.

  Less than a second later, Katherine’s head turns with the rest of her body. She whirls around to face her husband, who continues to drag her toward the couch. Her free arm rises, fingers curling into a fist that, once formed, connects with Tom’s jaw.

  The blow is hard.

  So hard I think I hear it from the other side of the lake, although more likely the sound is me letting out a half gasp of shock.

  Tom, looking more surprised than hurt, releases Katherine’s arm and stumbles backwards onto the couch. She seems to say something. Finally. No yelling from her. No pleading, either. Just a sentence uttered with what looks like commanding calmness.

  She leaves the room. Tom remains.

  I nudge the binoculars upward to the second floor, which remains dark. If that’s where Katherine went, I can’t see her.

  I return my gaze to the living room, where Tom has pulled himself back onto the sofa. Watching him hunched forward, head in his hands, makes me think I should call the police and report a domestic dispute.

  While I can’t begin to know the context of what I saw, there’s no mistake that some form of spousal abuse occurred. Although Katherine was the one to strike, it was only after Tom had grabbed her. And when our eyes briefly locked, it wasn’t malice or vengeance I saw.

  It was fear.

  Obvious, all-consuming fear.

  In my mind, Tom had it coming.

  It makes me wonder how many times something like this has happened before.

  It makes me worry it’ll happen again.

  The only thing I’m certain of is that I regret ever picking up these binoculars and watching the Royces. I knew it was wrong. Just like I knew that if I kept watching, I was eventually going to see something I didn’t want to see.

  Because I wasn’t spying on just one person.

  I was watching a married couple, which is far more complex and unwieldy.

  What is marriage but a series of mutual deceptions?

  That’s a line from Shred of Doubt. Before I was fired, I spoke it eight times a week, always getting an uneasy laugh from audience members who recognized the truth behind it. No marriage is completely honest. Each one is built on some type of deception, even if it’s something small and harmless. The husband pretending to like the sofa his wife picked out. The wife who watches her husband’s favorite show even though she quietly despises it.

  And sometimes it’s bigger.

  Cheating. Addiction. Secrets.

  Those can’t stay hidden forever. At some point, the truth comes out and all those carefully arranged deceptions topple like dominoes. Is that what I just saw in the Royce house? A marriage under pressure finally imploding?

  In the living room, Tom stands and crosses to the sideboard bar. He grabs a bottle of honey-colored liquid and splashes some into a glass.

  Above him, a light goes on in the master bedroom, revealing Katherine moving behind the gauzy curtains. I grab my phone when I see her, not thinking about what I’ll say. I simply call.

  Katherine answers with a hushed, husky “Hello?”

  “It’s Casey,” I say. “Is everything okay over there?”

  There’s nothing on Katherine’s end. Not a breath. Not a rustle. Just a blip of silence before she says, “Why wouldn’t things be okay?”

  “I thought I—”

  I barely manage to stop the word about to careen off my tongue.

  Saw.

  “I thought I heard something at your house,” I say. “And I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine. See.”

  My body goes numb.

  Katherine knows I’ve been watching.

  I guess I shouldn’t be this surprised. She’s been in this very same rocking chair, looking at her house through the same pair of binoculars now sitting next to me.

  I’d totally watch my house, she said, subtly indicating she knew I was watching, too.

  But there’s nothing subtle about this. Now she’s outright telling me to look.

  The sheer curtains in the master bedroom part, and I scramble for the binoculars. At the window, Katherine waves. Because she’s mostly cloaked in shadow, I can’t see her face.

  Or if she’s smiling.

  Or if the fear I noticed earlier is still in her eyes.

  All I can see is her still-waving silhouette until that, too, stops. Katherine’s hand drops to her side, and after standing at the window for another second, she backs away and leaves the room, hitting the light switch on her way out.

  Directly below that, Tom has finished his drink. He stands there a moment, staring into the empty glass, looking like he’s considering having another.

  Then his arm rears back and he flings the glass.

  It hits the wall and shatters.

  Tom storms back to the sofa, reaches for the lamp, and, with a flick of his fingers, an uneasy darkness returns to the house across the lake.

  I’m startled awake by a sound streaking across the lake. With my eyes still closed, I catch only the last breath of it. An echo of an echo fading fast as it whooshes deeper into the woods behind my house.

  I remain frozen in place for half a minute, waiting for the sound to return. But it’s gone now, whatever it was. The lake sits in silence as thick as a wool blanket and just as suffocating.

  I fully open my eyes to a gray-pink sky and a lake just beginning to sparkle with daylight.

  I spent the whole night on the porch.

  Jesus.

  My head pounds with pain and my body crackles with it. When I sit up, my joints creak louder than the rocking chair beneath me. As soon as I’m upright, the dizziness hits. A diabolical spinning that makes the world feel like it’s tilting off its axis and forces me to grip the arms of the chair for balance.

  I look down, hoping it will steady me. At my feet, rocking slightly on the porch floor, is the whiskey bottle, now mostly empty.

  Jesus.

  Seeing it brings a rush of nausea so strong it eclipses my pain and confusion and dizziness. I stand—somehow—and rush inside, heading for the small powder room just off the foyer.

  I make it to the powder room, but not the toilet. All the poison churning in my stomach comes out in a rush over the sink. I turn the tap on full blast to wash it down and stumble out of the room, toward the staircase on the other side of the living room. I can only reach the top floor by crawling up the steps. Once there, I continue down the hall on my hands and knees until I’m in the master bedroom, where I manage to pull myself into bed.

  I flop onto my back, my eyes closing of their own accord. I have no say in the matter. The last thought I have before spiraling into unconsciousness is a memory of the sound that woke me up. With it comes recognition.

  I now know what I heard.

  It was a scream.

  NOW

  Tell me what you did to Katherine,” I say again, twisting the towel that had just been in his mouth. It’s damp with saliva. An icky, warm wetness that makes me drop the towel to the floor. “Tell me and this will all be over.”

  He doesn’t, of course.

  There’s no reason he would.

  Not to me.

  Not after everything I’ve done. And what I’m still doing.

  Holding him captive.

  Lying to Wilma.

  I’ll have a lot of explaining to do later. Right now, though, my only goal is saving Katherine. If that’s even possible. I have no way of knowing until he tells me.

  “What happened to her?” I say after a minute passes and the only sound I hear is rain pounding the roof.

  He tilts his head to the side, unbearably smug. “You’re assuming I know.”

  I mirror his expression, right down to the thin-lipped smile that conveys anything but friendliness. “It’s not an assumption. Now tell me what you did with her.”

  “No.”

  “But you did do something?”

  “I want to ask you a question,” he says. “Why are you so concerned about Katherine? You barely knew her.”

  His use of the past tense sends a streak of fear down my back. I’m certain that was his intent.

  “That doesn’t matter,” I say. “Tell me where she is.”

  “A place where you’ll never find her.”

  The fear remains. Joining it is something new: anger. It bubbles in my chest, as hot and turbulent as boiling water. I leave the room and march downstairs as the lights perform another unnerving flicker.

  In the kitchen, I go to the knife block on the counter and grab the biggest blade. Then it’s back upstairs, back into the room, back to the bed where I’d slept as a child. It’s hard to fathom that that little girl is the same person now buzzed on bourbon and wielding a knife. If I hadn’t personally experienced the years between those two points, I wouldn’t believe it myself.

  With trembling hands, I touch the knife’s tip to his side. A poke of warning.

  “Tell me where she is.”

  Rather than cower in fear, he laughs. An actual, honest-to-God laugh. It scares me even more that he finds this situation so amusing.

  “You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing,” he says.

  I say nothing.

  Because he’s right.

  I don’t.

  But that’s not going to stop me from doing it anyway.

  BEFORE

  I wake again just after nine, my head still pounding but the spinning and nausea blessedly gone. Still, I feel like death. Smell like it, too. And I’m certain I look like it.

  My mother would be appalled.

  I am appalled.

  As I sit up in a tangle of blankets, the first thing I notice is the muted rush of running water coming from downstairs.

  The sink in the powder room.

  I never turned it off.

  I leap out of bed, hobble down the steps, find the tap still running at full blast. Two-thirds of the basin is filled with water, and I suspect excellent plumbing is the only thing that prevented it from overflowing. I cut the water as memories of last night come back in stark flashes.

  The whiskey.

  The binoculars.

  The fight and the phone call and Katherine’s wave at the window.

  And the scream.

  The last thing I remember but the most important. And the most suspect. Did I really hear a scream at the break of dawn? Or was it just part of a drunken dream I had while passed out on the porch?

  While I hope it was the latter, I suspect it was the former. I assume that in a dream, I would have heard a scream more clearly. A vivid cry filling my skull. But what I heard this morning was something else.

  The aftermath of a scream.

  A sound both vague and elusive.

  But if the scream did happen—which is the theory working its way through my hungover brain—it sounded like Katherine. Well, it sounded like a woman. And as far as I know, she’s the only other woman staying at the lake right now.

  I spend the next few minutes hunting my phone, eventually finding it still on the porch, sitting on the table next to the binoculars. After an entire night spent outside, there’s only a wisp of battery life left. Before taking it inside to charge, I check to see if I got any calls or texts from Katherine.