call just seconds before Lily started crying. She sat on the top step for a moment, buzzing with frustration.
Then she got up and went to Lily, unstrapping her and carrying her back up to the nursery.
It was another world. Stars on the ceiling, a white-and-blue ocean mural on the wall. The nightlight projected buttery-yellow sea turtles that languidly circled the room. The gauzy shades were always drawn, casting the room perpetually in a peaceful milky light. Lily was warm and soft in Rain’s arms, smelled like the lavender shampoo Rain used on her every night. The baby’s eyes glittered, smile big and gurgling.
“Hello, sunshine,” Rain said, peering into her daughter’s perfect flushed face.
She sat in the glider, rocking and nursing again. It was hypnotic, the quiet of the room, the warmth of her child, that flood of oxytocin, the low sound of waves from the noise machine. Her frustration eased; the belly of fire cooled.
It was enough, wasn’t it?
Maybe. If this room, pretty and safe, was the whole world.
But it wasn’t.
Laney Markham would have had this. But her husband, a sociopath, brutally ended her life, and the life of their child. Then, he escaped justice, walked free while Laney’s brokenhearted father raged. And Laney’s mother sat stoic, pale and rigid, as though the blood had stopped moving through her veins. Grief had turned her to stone; it was more devastating to see than the father’s fury.
That was it. It was the case that did her in. The ugliness of it; she was sick with it, like a flu she couldn’t shake. Gillian’s words knocked around her head for weeks and months.
Bad people win. They win all the time.
When just a few weeks after the crushing acquittal, Greg asked if she would consider staying home with the baby for a while, she agreed, surprising him—and herself. Money would be a bit tight, but whatever. She worked in news; layoffs were always looming. Money was always tight.
She gave it up—the work that had defined her.
Now, Markham was dead. She felt a tickle of relief. A sort of justice had been delivered, something in line with her good-always-triumphs-over-evil belief system. Murder? Suicide? Home invasion robbery gone wrong? Accident?
A federal investigation underway. A connection to the Boston Boogeyman.
Let it go. It’s not your story anymore.
Lily gazed up at Rain and started kicking her legs happily.
Or is it?
FOUR
The rain knocks on the tin roof and the sound of it always makes me think of you. Not because of the name you gave yourself. I never called you Rain.
The sound reminds me of your childhood home. I used to love that old house, how it was deep back in the woods. Rooms dim, with wind chimes on the porch. Your father still lives there, doesn’t he?
Your mother seemed always to be cooking, some black-and-white movie playing on that tiny portable television perched on the kitchen counter. Your father’s study smelled of leather and cigarette smoke.
I’d marvel at his shelves and shelves of dusty books, the typewriter on the rickety wood table by the window. He had a computer, of course. But he’d write on that old thing and give your mother the pages to enter into “the box,” as he liked to call it. His keyboard clatter echoed down the hardwood floor of the hallway. I loved his tall thinness, the way his suit jackets hung off his broad shoulders. He was a writer, a real writer. You were often mad at him because he cared more about the page than he did about you, or so it seemed. I think you were wrong about that. You didn’t see the way he looked at you. As if you were a princess and a unicorn and a rainbow all rolled into one perfect girl.
My house was different, sprawling and frigid, filled with light, professionally decorated, museum white and gray, expensive pieces of modern art chosen by my mother not for love, or because she had any idea what was truly beautiful, but because it “went with the room.” My father only cared about numbers. My mother, I’m not sure what she cared about then, before. Afterward, she had a kind of awakening, became someone else. But then, they worked all week, lay by the pool all weekend. They watched television in bed at night with the lights out. Sometimes I’d wake up and it would still be on, its blue glow flickering through the crack of the door left ajar. There were no books in my house,