“Change of plan,” Oscar Fine said. He waved the barrel at me. “Come.”

I took my arm from around Jan and walked across the room, past Oscar Fine and through the door. He stayed close behind me. I could feel the barrel of the gun touching my back.

“Stay very close,” he said.

From downstairs, I heard Barry Duckworth yell, “Mr. Harwood?”

“Up here,” I said, not shouting, but in a voice loud enough to be heard.

“Are you okay?” Lights started coming on downstairs.

“No. And my wife’s been shot.”

“I’ve already called an ambulance.” Duckworth had reached the bottom of the stairs. Oscar Fine and I were standing behind the short upstairs hall railing, about to turn and come down the stairs.

Duckworth, who had his weapon drawn, looked up. I could see the puzzlement in his face, wondering who the man behind me could be.

Oscar Fine said, “I’m going to shoot Mr. Harwood if you don’t let us leave together.”

Duckworth, his gun angled upward, took a moment to assess things. “There’s going to be a dozen officers out front in about two minutes,” he said.

“Then we have to move quickly,” Oscar said, moving me down a step at a time. “Lower your weapon or I’ll shoot Mr. Harwood right now.”

Duckworth, seeing the gun at my back, lowered his gun, but held on to it. “You need to give yourself up,” he said.

“No,” he said. We were halfway down the stairs now. “Please back away.”

Duckworth took a couple of steps back toward the front door.

We reached the first floor. Keeping me in front of him as a shield, Oscar Fine started easing me toward the kitchen. He was going to take me out the back door. Maybe his car was parked a block over, and we’d be heading through the backyard and between the houses to get there.

Duckworth watched in frustration. His eyes met mine.

We were under the railing when I noticed Duckworth glancing up.

Oscar Fine and I both craned our necks upward at the same time, too.

It was Jan. She was standing at the railing, leaning over it at the waist. A drop of blood touched my forehead like warm rain.

She said, “You will never hurt my son.”

And then her body pivoted forward. She wasn’t leaning on the railing, she was pitching herself right over it.

As she started to come down, I saw that she was clutching firmly, in both hands, the two-foot daggerlike plank of hardwood flooring I’d caught my hand on.

She plunged over the side, the plank pointing straight down ahead of her.

Oscar Fine had no time to react before its sharp, ragged end caught him where neck meets shoulder. The force of Jan’s fall rammed the plank deep into his torso, and that, combined with the weight of Jan’s body, put him down on the floor in an instant.

Neither of them moved after that.

Jan and Oscar Fine were both declared dead at the scene. Once the initial panic was over, I couldn’t bring myself to go back into the front hall and look at the tangled wreckage that was my wife and her killer.

I spent the better part of an hour with Barry Duckworth, explaining everything to him as best I could. Broad strokes, mostly. Many of the details I didn’t know, and didn’t expect I ever would.

I had the sense he believed me.

But even before we got into that, I had something more urgent to discuss with him.

“Ethan’s still missing,” I said. “Jan was certain Oscar Fine had taken him, but upstairs there, just before everything happened, he said he didn’t know anything about him.”

“Was he lying, you think?” Duckworth asked. “Messing with you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “If he’d had Ethan, I think he would have enjoyed taunting us with the fact.”

But to be certain, we found a black Audi-registered to Oscar Fine-one street over. We checked the back seat and trunk for any signs of Ethan.

We came up empty.

“We have everyone working on this,” Duckworth assured me as the two of us sat together at the kitchen table. “Every single available member of the department is looking for your boy. We’ve brought people in on their days off. We’re doing a block-by-block search.”

“What if Ethan’s disappearance… what if it has nothing to do with any of this?” I asked. “What if he just wandered off? Or some sick son a bitch just happened to be driving through the neighborhood and-”

“Regardless,” Duckworth said, “we’re doing everything, exploring all those angles. We’re interviewing everyone on your parents’ street and your street, doing a door-to-door right now.”

None of this made me feel any better.

“She did it for Ethan,” I said. “And for me.”

“She did what?” Duckworth said.

“She pulled it together long enough to kill that man so I’d be there for Ethan.”

“I guess she did,” Duckworth said.

“She said she didn’t expect my forgiveness,” I said.

“Maybe, if she could ask you now…”

I said nothing and looked down at the table.

Mom and Dad arrived shortly after that. There was hugging and crying, and as I had done with Duckworth, I tried to tell them what I knew about the events of the last three days.

And the last six years. And even before that.

“Where could Ethan be?” Mom asked. “Where would he go?”

While Duckworth went off to help oversee the crime scene, the three of us sat at the table, not knowing what to do.

We were tired, depressed, traumatized.

Part of me was grieving.

Sometime around midnight, the phone rang. I picked up.

“Hello?” I said.

“Mr. Harwood?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve done a terrible thing.”

I was there by 3 a.m.

Detective Duckworth put up some objections at first. First, he didn’t want me leaving the crime scene. Second, if I knew who had taken my son, if he’d been kidnapped, Duckworth had to send in the police.

“I don’t know that it’s exactly a kidnapping,” I said. “At least not now. It’s kind of complicated. Just let me go and get my boy. I know where he is. Let me bring him home.”

He mulled it over a moment, then finally said, “Go.” He said he’d try to pave the way for me with the New York Thruway authorities, maybe save me the trouble of getting pulled over for speeding.

When I pulled up in front of the Richlers’ house on Lincoln Avenue in Rochester, the living room lights were on. I didn’t have to knock. Gretchen Richler was standing at the door waiting for me, and had it open as I came up the porch steps.

“Let me see him,” I said.

She nodded. She led me upstairs and pushed open the door to what I presumed to be the bedroom she shared with her husband, who was not around. Ethan was under the covers, his head on the pillow, sound asleep.

“I’ll let him sleep for a bit more,” I said.

“I’ve put on some coffee,” Gretchen said. “Would you like some?”

“Yes,” I said, following her back downstairs. “Is your husband…”

“Still in the hospital,” she said. “They have him in the psychiatric ward, I guess they call it. They’ve got him under observation.”

“How do they think he’s going to be?”

“It’s a kind of wait-and-see situation,” she said. “With any luck, he could be home in a few days, although I… I don’t know how he’ll fend on his own.”

She filled two mugs with coffee and set them on the kitchen table. “Would you like some cookies?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Coffee’s fine.”

Gretchen Richler took a seat across from me. “I know what I did was wrong,” she said.

I blew on the coffee, took a sip. “Tell me what happened.”

“Well, first of all, we were looking at that picture you left with us, the one of your wife. It was the necklace she was wearing. The cupcake.”

“Yes?”

“It had been our daughter’s. She’d lost it just before she died. She’d accused Constance of stealing it. When I saw it on your wife, it all came together. I knew.”