Rolling off her, Dwayne said to Jan, “I always like to start a big day like this with a bang.”

She got out of the motel bed, slipped into the bathroom, and closed the door.

Dwayne, on his back and looking at the ceiling, laced his fingers behind his head and smiled. “This is it, baby. A few hours and we’ll be set. You know what I think we should do later today? We should look at boats. I’ll bet there are all kinds of people selling their boats. Just when everyone else is unloading their goodies because of the recession, we’re going to be doing just fine. We’ll be able to pick up some twenty- or thirty-foot cabin cruiser for a song, not that we couldn’t pay full price if we wanted to. But if this money is going to last us the rest of our lives, we don’t want to be really stupid with it, am I right?”

Jan hadn’t heard anything after “baby.” She had turned on the shower after taking a moment to figure out how the taps worked in this one-star joint, which was about five miles from downtown Boston. Plenty close enough, considering her nervousness about being anywhere around here.

Dwayne threw back the covers and stood naked in the room. He grabbed the remote and turned on the television. He was flipping through the channels at high speed.

“They don’t get any of the good stations here,” he said. “Why do they make you pay extra for the adult stuff? Don’t they already charge enough for the room?”

He landed on a cartoon network that was running an animated Batman episode, got bored with that, and kept on surfing. He’d gone past a news channel and was already onto a stand-up comedy show when he said, “The fuck?” He went back a couple of stations and there was Jan. A photo of her.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Get out here!”

She didn’t hear him from under the shower.

Dwayne banged the door open and shouted, “You’re on the fucking TV!”

He tapped the volume up so high the television cabinet began to vibrate. The anchor was saying, “-yet when invited by the station to take a lie detector test, Mr. Harwood flatly refused. The journalist for the Promise Falls Standard says his wife went missing from the Five Mountains amusement park Saturday, yet police sources have said that no one has actually seen Jan Harwood since late Friday afternoon. And there’s a new development this morning. The body of a coworker of the missing woman was found in the Lake George area, not far from where Jan Harwood and her husband were seen before she went missing. Looks like we’re going to have some sunshine this afternoon in the greater Boston-”

Dwayne killed the TV and went back into the bathroom. He reached through the shower curtain and turned off the water. Jan’s hair was in full lather.

“Dwayne! Shit!”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“What is it?”

“It was on the news. They were chasing your husband, asking him to take a lie detector test, and they found the body.”

Jan squinted at him through soapy eyes. She was instantly feeling cold as the water dripped from her naked body. She said, “Okay.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Let me finish up in here,” Jan said.

“Want me to get in with you?”

She answered by pulling the curtain shut. She went back to fiddling with the taps. The water blasted out cold at first, and she huddled, as though that would somehow protect her. She swore under her breath, adjusted the knob and then nearly scalded herself. She dialed it back and found the right temperature, then stuck her face into the spray to get the shampoo out of her eyes.

But they’d been stinging before this.

She’d found herself-she could hardly believe it when it happened-crying at one point in the night. Dwayne was snoring like a band saw, so there was no risk of waking him.

Not that she was sobbing uncontrollably. She hadn’t been bawling her eyes out or anything undignified like that. But there was this moment when she felt, well, overwhelmed.

A couple of tears got away before she fought them back. You didn’t want to slip out of character.

You didn’t want people thinking you cared.

But as she lay there in bed, she imagined putting her hand on Ethan’s head, feeling the silky strands of his hair on her palm. She imagined the smell of him. The sounds his feet made padding on the floor when he got up in the morning and walked into their bedroom to see if she was awake. The way his fingers picked up Cheerios, how he stuffed them into his mouth, the sounds he made when he chewed. How he sat, cross-legged, in front of the television when he watched Thomas the Tank Engine.

The warmth of his body when he crawled into bed with her.

Think about the money.

She tried to push him out of her thoughts as she lay there in the middle of the night. The way some people might count sheep, she counted diamonds.

But Ethan’s face kept materializing before her eyes.

From the moment she started going out with David, she’d convinced herself it was about the money. This façade, this marriage, this raising a child, it was all part of the job. This was how she was earning her fortune. She just had to do the time, until Dwayne got out, and she’d be out of there. She’d walk away and not look back. And once she’d exchanged the diamonds for cash, she’d be rid of Dwayne, too.

One last costume change.

With any luck, the way she’d left things in Promise Falls, no one would be looking for her. At least not alive. And when they didn’t find her body, the police would figure David had done a very good job of disposing of it. Oh, he’d tell them he had nothing to do with it, that he was an innocent man, but wasn’t that what all guilty men said?

Maybe he’d even, at some point, suspect what it was that had really happened. When and if it finally dawned on him that his wife had set him up, what exactly was he going to do about it from a jail cell? He’d have spent everything he had on lawyers trying to beat the charges. He wasn’t going to have anything left to hire a private detective to track her down.

At least Ethan would be okay. His grandparents would look after him. Don, he was a bit loopy at times, but his heart was in the right place. And while Jan never much cared for the way Arlene looked at her sometimes-it was like she knew Jan was up to something, but she couldn’t figure out what it was-there was no doubt she’d be able to raise that boy. She had a lot of years left in her, and she loved Ethan to death.

Jan struggled to find some comfort in that.

Maybe, once she had her money, once she really knew there was a new life waiting for her, a new life where she could do anything she wanted, she’d be able to forget about the last few years, pretend they never happened, make believe the people she’d known-and the one she had brought into the world-during that time never really existed.

Once she had the money.

The money would change everything.

Money had a way of healing all sorts of wounds, of helping one move on. That’s what she’d always believed.

Dwayne stopped the truck on Beacon Street, just west of Clarendon.

“Here you go,” he said.

Jan looked to her right. They were parked out front of a MassTrust branch sandwiched between a Starbucks and a high-end shoe store.

“This is it?” she said.

“This is it. Your key opens a box right here.”

This had been the way they’d worked it. They’d each picked a safe-deposit box to store their half of the diamonds, kept the location secret, and then swapped keys. That way, they’d need each other when they wanted to cash in.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

They got out of the truck together and walked through the front doors of the bank and went up to a service counter.

Jan said, “We’d like to get into our safe-deposit box.”

“Of course,” said a middle-aged woman. She needed a name, and for Dwayne to sign in a book, and then she led them into a vault where small, rectangular mailboxlike doors lined three walls.