“Here’s yours right here,” the woman said, producing a key and inserting it into a door. Jan took out the key she’d been holding on to for five years, inserted it into the accompanying slot. The door opened and the woman slid out a long black box.

As she tipped it, something inside rattled softly.

“There’s a room right here for your convenience,” she said, opening the door so Dwayne and Jan could enter. She set the box down on a counter and withdrew, closing the door on her way out. The room was about five by five feet, well lit, with a padded office chair in front of the counter.

“This place is even smaller than my cell,” Dwayne said. He hooked his fingers under the front of the box lid and lifted. “Oh boy.”

Inside was a black fabric bag with a drawstring at the end, the kind that might hold a pair of shoes or slippers.

Jan reached and took out the bag, feeling the contents inside first without opening.

“Feels like teeth,” she said nervously.

She loosened the drawstring and tipped the bag over the counter.

The diamonds began spilling out. Much smaller than teeth, but far more glittery. They hit the counter and scattered. Dozens and dozens of them. More than they could count at a glance.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Dwayne said, like he’d never seen these gems before. He picked them up randomly, rolled them around in his palm, held them up to the fluorescent light as though that would tell him anything about their worth.

Jan was shaking her head slowly in disbelief.

“And this is just half of them, sugar tits,” Dwayne said. “We are so fucking rich.”

“Calm down,” Jan said. “We need to keep it together. We start getting all crazy, we’ll do something stupid.”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Take one of these next door and buy a latte with it?” Dwayne asked.

“I just… I didn’t remember there was this many,” she whispered.

She started collecting them, slipping them back into the bag. “I think one of them fell on the floor,” she said.

Dwayne dropped down to his hands and knees, running his palms across the surface of the short-pile industrial carpet. “Got it,” he said, and then he wrapped his arms around Jan’s legs, pulling her toward him, burying his face in the crotch of her jeans.

“We should do it in here,” he said.

“We can think about celebrating later,” she said. “After we get our money. Then, we’ll fuck our brains out.” Give ’em what they want, she thought.

Dwayne stood up, took the bag from Jan’s hand.

“I’ll put it in my purse,” she said.

“No, it’s okay,” he said, stuffing the bag into the front pocket of his jeans, which created an unsightly, off-center bulge. “I got it.”

Jan gave directions to Dwayne that took them north across the Charles on the Harvard Bridge, then over to Cambridge Street.

“Stop anywhere around here,” she said.

“Where is it?” he asked, pulling over to the curb and putting the truck in park. He’d spotted a Bank of America and figured that was the place, but Jan pointed across the street to a Revere Federal branch.

“Fucking awesome,” he said, feeling in his other front pocket for the safe-deposit box key he’d been hanging on to for so long.

He had his hand on the door when Jan reached over and held his arm. “This time,” she said, “I’ll hold on to them.”

“Yeah, sure, no big deal,” he said, pulling his arm away.

“I mean it,” she said.

They crossed the street on the diagonal, nearly getting hit by an SUV as they stood on the center line waiting for traffic to pass. Terrific, Jan thought. Moments away from getting your fortune and you get hit by a Tahoe.

Once they were safely across, they entered the bank and followed much the same routine. This time, a young East Indian man led them into the vault, then ushered them into a private room so that they could inspect the contents of the box.

“This never gets old,” Dwayne said when Jan opened the bag and spilled its contents onto the table.

Once the diamonds were back in the bag, and the bag safely tucked into Jan’s purse, they walked out of the bank and back to the truck.

All of their loot, recovered.

Jan thought, In a perfect world, there’d be a way to hang on to Dwayne’s half, without hanging on to Dwayne.

She wondered whether he might be thinking something similar.

Sam didn’t sell me out. As best as I could tell, the city desk had not had their way with the story. It hadn’t been jazzed up, slanted, or twisted. It was a factual, direct, straightforward account of what had been going on for the last two days. It didn’t ignore the fact that the police had been talking to me at length about Jan’s disappearance, but it did not go so far as to name me as a suspect. Neither Detective Duckworth nor anyone else with the Promise Falls police had said anything as direct as that.

Sam had also managed to get into her story the discovery of a woman’s body in Lake George. An astute reader would put it together, that maybe I’d killed Jan and buried her up there, but the story didn’t spell it out. The police had not identified the body as Leanne Kowalski’s, at least not by Sam’s Sunday night deadline. I was betting, however, that that information might be on the website version of the story by now, but I wasn’t able to check, considering that the police had taken our laptop when they’d searched the house the day before.

I had a lot to do that Monday, and needed to get Ethan up and over to my parents’ house. I woke him shortly after eight, sitting on the edge of the bed and rubbing his shoulder.

“Time to get moving, sport,” I said, pulling back his covers. The inside of the bed was littered with cars and action figures.

“I’m tired,” he said, grabbing one of the toy cars and drawing it toward his face like it was a teddy bear.

“I know. But soon you’ll be starting school. You’ll be getting up early almost every morning.”

“I don’t want to go to school,” he said, turning his head into the pillow.

“That’s what everyone says, at first,” I said. “But then once they start going, they really start to like it.”

“I just want to go to Nana and Poppa’s.”

“Yesterday you didn’t even want to be there,” I reminded him. He buried his face in his pillow, an interesting debating strategy. “You’ll still see lots of them. But you’ll get to see other people, too. And lots of kids your own age.”

He turned his head, coming up for air. “What’s Mommy making for breakfast?”

“I’m making breakfast. What do you want?”

“Cheerios,” he said, then added, “and coffee.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Although it might be just the thing to wake you up.”

“What does it taste like?”

“Pretty awful, most of the time.”

“Then why do you drink it?”

“Habit,” I said. “You drink it enough times, you stop noticing how bad it is.”

“Get Mommy.”

I left my hand on his shoulder, rubbed it softly. “Mommy’s still not here,” I said.

“She’s been away for…” He closed his eyes for a few seconds. “She’s been away for two sleeps.”

“I know,” I said.

While he gathered together his bed toys, he asked, “Did she go fishing?”

“Fishing?”

“Sometimes people go away fishing.” He looked at Robin, smoothed out his cape. “Poppa goes away fishing sometimes.”

“That’s true. But I don’t think your mom has gone fishing.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think fishing is really her thing,” I said.

“Then where would she go?” He had Robin in one hand, Wolverine in the other. They were facing each other, about to engage in combat, or just shoot the shit. It was hard to know.

“I wish I knew,” I said. “Listen, I need to talk to you about something.”

Ethan looked at me, his face all innocent, like maybe I was going to tell him we were out of Cheerios and he was going to have to eat toast. He still had the action figures in his fists, and I pushed them down to get his full attention.