faced their neighbors’ house. She moved the curtain two inches to one side.
“Lights on?” Matthew asked.
“Nope.”
“What were you saying?”
Mira turned. “Maybe she had something to do with it. I mean, are they looking at her? She was there. You weren’t. Maybe she’s framing you for a crime.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why not? She thinks you’ve killed someone and gotten away with it, so she kills someone else and says she saw you do it.”
“It’s ridiculous. But if that’s what happened then the police will figure it out.”
“Can you show me that article, the one about her in college?”
That night, in bed, Matthew listened to his wife’s breathing as it slowed and began to purr a little. He thought she was finally asleep when she said, “What time do you think the police detectives will be at work in the morning?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’m calling as soon as I get up. You never know, they might get there early.”
Five minutes later, she asked, “Are you sure the door is bolted from the inside?”
“I am,” he said, “but I can check again if you’d like.”
“No, I believe you. What a bitch,” Mira said, as though they’d been in the middle of discussing their neighbor. It was not a word Matthew had ever heard his wife use.
“Let’s not totally jump to conclusions, either. Maybe it’s just a big misunderstanding. Maybe she really did think she saw me there.”
“I’d think that, too, but that article. What she did to that girl in college.”
“I know,” Matthew said. And now she’s wrecked everything. I had two lives before I met Henrietta Mazur, both of them simple, with their own comforts and rewards. And from out of nowhere she’s come along and turned those two lives into one. One complicated mess of a life. I never thought I’d lie in bed and listen to Mira talk about murders, but here I am. I want to call Hen a bitch as well, but that is what my father would’ve called her. She’s not a bitch, but she is too smart for her own good. I feel like I’m on a small boat in the middle of a huge storm. I need to ride the waves and wait for it all to blow over.
Before she finally fell asleep, Mira said, “I love you, Bear,” a name she hadn’t used for at least a year. He immediately curled up next to her, making himself small, moving his leg across her thighs.
“Love you, too,” he said, burrowing his face into her neck.
“Shh,” she said as he tried to squeeze closer to her, as though he were freezing and she were his only source of warmth. “Shh, it’s going to be all right.”
“You promise?” he said, his voice whispery.
“I promise, Bear, I promise.”
Chapter 19
Mira opened her eyes at dawn. She knew she’d slept, although her body and her mind didn’t feel rested. She swung herself off the bed, moving carefully so as not to wake Matthew, still curled up on his side.
She put on a robe and went downstairs, making coffee, then chugging a glass of water. She was still so thirsty, a remnant of the hangover she’d suffered the previous day, after drinking far too much at the Portsmouth Arms. Her stomach was queasy and there was a pulsing ache in her temples, almost like one of her migraines, but she knew it was from alcohol and stress. She went into the living room, thought about lying down on the couch, but decided to try to meditate instead. That was something her father did, ten minutes of meditation every morning before he drank his coffee. He swore by it, and she trusted him because, other than the meditation, her father was maybe the most pragmatic non-new-age-y person she knew. She got her yoga mat and sat cross-legged on the floor, focusing on her breathing and staring at a patch of early-morning light that lay in a rhombus across the hardwood floor. It almost worked, but she couldn’t shut out the bizarre events of yesterday, especially learning that it was Hen, their new neighbor, who had claimed to have witnessed Matthew at the scene of a murder. It was ludicrous—the whole thing was ludicrous—but Mira was trying to make sense of it. Hen had told her that she suffered from depression, mentioning how she didn’t want any children because she didn’t want to pass along her brain. Maybe she was just unhinged, and, for whatever reason, she had decided—this was what Matthew