“Shush,” he said. “With time, when I can trust you, it won’t have to be like this. But you have to earn my trust, okay? You earn my trust and you can have all sorts of freedoms. But if you wrong me, I’ll kill you and your whole family. I’ll kill your family while you watch, then kill you. Don’t think I won’t.”

Her parents had given her similar instructions about trust-except for the killing part. She cried harder, wondering how awful it was going to be. She had read stories about rape, of course. Quite a few, given her taste in reading. And four years ago, she had watched, along with millions of others, an episode of a soap opera where a rape victim married her rapist. Of course, they had come a long way by then, Luke and Laura. They had been on the run together, evaded death, grown close. They were in love, and she had forgiven him. Vonnie had insisted, loudly and at great length, that it was all crap. But when the afternoon of the wedding came, Vonnie was there, watching as raptly as Elizabeth and her friends. They did not find the groom particularly handsome, but they understood that he was desirable because he loved his bride so much, that his love for her had driven him to commit crimes and take enormous risks. That one of those crimes had been an assault on his alleged beloved was tricky, but they understood. To be loved that way, to be desired to the point where you drove a man mad-what more could any girl want?

“Look,” the man said, “can you be brave? Can you be good?”

She nodded, although she was sure she could not.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take the gag out. But you have to be good. You know what I mean, by good? No screaming or crying. If you make a sound, I’ll put the gag in and show you the ways I know how to hurt people. I’m not a man to be messed with. Just go to sleep, and we’ll talk things out in the morning.”

Her mouth freed, she thought for a moment about screaming her head off but found she could not make the sounds come. She was too frightened, too scared. His hands lingered near her throat. She thought about the mound of dirt where she had first seen the man, working with his shovel. He had not said, explicitly, what he had done, but she knew. He was capable of killing someone. He had done it. Elizabeth decided in that moment that she would do whatever was necessary to survive. She would endure whatever plans he had for her, as long as she was allowed to live.

“What’s your name?” she whispered.

“Walter,” he said. “I think sometimes I should shorten it to Walt. What do you think?”

She was terrified that there was a right answer, and she wouldn’t give it. “Both are nice.”

He watched her for a while, hands at the ready to clamp over her mouth. His gaze was detached, curious. She snuffled and gagged a little on her tears, but was otherwise quiet as commanded. He took his hand away-and went to sleep.

Eventually, she slept, too, and they stayed that way, side by side, on top of the bedspread. He touched her only once, turning her on her side and complaining: “You snore.”

FOR A FEW DAYS, letter to Walter was like a pink elephant, the one in the mental exercise that instructs a person to think about anything they desired-with the exception of pink elephants. Had he gotten it? Was it enough? Would he be disappointed?

She had written him with what she hoped was polite finality. Yes, she was married and living in the area. (Funny to be vague, when he knew her exact address.) She omitted any reference, any hint, to Iso and Albie. Walter was not a pedophile, although there had always been some confusion about that, given the age of his victims, and she doubted he would escape, much less head toward Bethesda if he should. But the fact of motherhood was too intimate to share with him. She wrote that it was interesting to hear from him, yet not completely unexpected. How she had struggled over those words, weighed each one. What would Walter read into “not completely unexpected”? He had an uncanny ability to hear what he wanted, to glean meanings that no one else could see. Later, in college, when she took a course in semiotics, she couldn’t help thinking that Walter could give Derrida a run for his money. Walter took everything down to the word, then made words signify what he wanted them to, justify whatever he wanted to do. He was like a character from Alice in Wonderland, or one of the later Oz books, the one with the town where everyone spoke nonsense. Rigamarole, that was it.

Still, she also was careful not to write anything that would cause him trouble, although the letter would not be scrutinized by some official. Walter was most unpredictable, most likely to lash out, when he thought someone was trying to hurt him. She chose to send her letter via the same PO box that had been used as the return address on the letter to her, not the prison’s address. She knew this meant that Walter’s coconspirator, whoever it was-please, not Jared Garrett-might read the letter first, although she put it in a sealed envelope within the stamped and addressed one. But whoever was helping Walter already knew who and where she was. If she sent the letter in care of the prison, it would take only one gossipy correctional officer to send her life careering out of control.

Besides, she understood now why he had written via an intermediary. As an inmate, he was not allowed to write just anyone, a fact she had been able to establish by a cursory search of the official Web page maintained by Virginia ’s prison system. Correctional facilities, as the official jargon had it. The word struck her as sweetly naive and utterly false. While she realized that prisons did attempt to rehabilitate inmates, she was not sure how anyone on death row could be said to be in a correctional facility, unless one considered death a correction.

She struggled most over the ending. Sincerely? Insincere. All the best? More like, All my worst. She chose to sign her name, assigning no emotion at all.

TIME, HER OLD FRIEND, exercised its subtle power. The letter dropped to the back of her mind, like a sock lost behind the dryer. Or, perhaps more accurately, a bit of perishable food behind the refrigerator, something that would eventually stink or bring pests into the house but that enjoyed a brief, carefree amnesty in the short term. Meanwhile, there had been too much to do to prepare for the beginning of school. The children would be attending two different schools, with Iso riding a bus to middle school and Albie attending the elementary school within walking distance. It would be Eliza’s responsibility to get them both off in the morning, which didn’t bother her at all. This was her job, it was what she did, and she was-she admitted privately-superb at it. Privately because it was the kind of sentiment that did not land gently, anywhere. Vonnie became almost enraged at the idea that Eliza considered being a mother a full-time job, and a satisfying one at that. Even their mother couldn’t help wondering where Eliza would find fulfillment as the children grew. Inez was forever suggesting that Eliza would want to return to school eventually, finish the graduate degree she had abandoned at Rice. The women in Peter’s world, the ones she met at those endless functions, tried hard to remember to add “outside the home” when they asked if Eliza worked, or had ever worked, but their politeness could not mask their belief that what she did was not work. Hard, perhaps, tedious without a doubt. But not work.

That was okay. Eliza didn’t consider it work, either, because she enjoyed it too much. It was the thing at which she excelled. She wasn’t one of the smarmily perfect mothers, packing ambitious lunches, never falling back on prepared treats for classroom parties. But she was more or less unflappable, rolling with things. In fact, she liked a bit of a crisis now and then-the science project left until the last minute, lost homework, lost anything. Nothing remained missing when Eliza began searching for it. She knew her children so well that it was easy for her to re-create those absentminded moments when things were put down in the wrong place. She was aware, for example, that Iso took out her retainer while watching television, so it was often found balanced on the arm of the sofa. She understood that dreamy Albie lived so far inside his own imagination that anything could become part of that world. His knapsack might be found perched on the head of the enormous stuffed dog his aunt Vonnie had given him, creating a reasonable facsimile of an archbishop, although Albie was probably aiming for a wizard.