Ah, the usual chit-chatty check-in—laced with a slight hint of accusation.

Landry deletes the message.

Beck leans back, rubbing her eyes.

She’s just spent hours sitting at the kitchen table on her laptop, alternately reading every entry and subsequent comment on her mother’s blog and still trying to figure out the password to her e-mail.

She’s tried every combination of her parents’ initials, plus her own and her brothers’, along with various symbols and phone numbers and birthdates in chronological and reverse order . . .

Nothing has worked.

She’s been keeping track, at least, on a yellow legal pad, so that she won’t waste her time on duplicate guesses. Now she flips the pages, scanning the list of everything she’s tried, feeling as though she’s missing the obvious.

Hearing a floorboard creak in the next room, she looks up. It’s either her father or Keith. Her brothers again drove back home for the night, promising to come back first thing in the morning.

After they left, Keith said he was going to bed and disappeared up the stairs, ever-present phone in hand. Since there’s only a twin bed in her old bedroom, he’s sleeping across the hall, in one of the bunk beds that once belonged to her brothers.

Dad adjourned to the den around the same time, presumably planning to spend the night in his recliner once again. Beck had offered him her room, pointing out that she can sleep in the other bunk in the boys’ room where Keith is, but Dad turned her down.

That was fine with her—and not just because she understood how hard it would be for her father to climb the stairs to go to bed, no matter which bedroom he was sleeping in.

She’s just not eager to share space with Keith right now, and she’s pretty sure he feels the same way.

“What did you tell them?” she asked him after he spoke to the detectives this afternoon.

“What do you think I told them?”

“I have no idea. Why do you think I’m asking?” she said aloud.

To herself, she thought, Jackass.

Thank God she never confided in him about her father—about what she saw, that one time.

The incident did nag at her for a few weeks after it happened, and at the time she considered telling Keith about it, but she kept it to herself in the end.

Thank God. Thank God.

The floorboard creaks again.

“Hello?” she calls.

As much as she hopes her father is finally getting some sleep, she’d prefer to see him pop up in the kitchen doorway right now, rather than her husband.

“Dad? Keith?”

No reply. She’s just starting to think she imagined the creaking when a shadow falls across the floor.

Keith.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Why are you still up?” he asks, simultaneously.

He’s still dressed—or perhaps dressed again—in jeans and a T-shirt. And he’s wearing shoes, she notices.

“I’m hungry,” he says with a shrug. “Is there any more of that chicken casserole from dinner?”

She looks from his face to the phone in his hand to the fridge.

“Help yourself.”

He crosses over to the refrigerator and opens the door. “So what are you doing up, Rebecca?”

He always calls her by her full name, unlike her family and friends. That never really bothered her until now. In fact, when she first met him she thought it was sweet and refreshing.

But lately—especially here in her childhood home, where she’s been referred to as Beck all her life—her given name, particularly on her husband’s lips, seems stiff and formal.

“I was just rereading my mother’s blog,” she tells him.

And trying to hack into her e-mail account . . .

But Keith doesn’t need to know that. For some reason, she feels like he might not approve.

“Why?” he asks.

“Why, what?”

“Why are you reading her blog?”

“I was just looking for . . .” She trails off, watching him lift a corner of foil off the casserole dish in the fridge, peer inside, and fold it back down.

“What were you looking for?” he asks.

“I was just looking to see what she’d written lately. That’s all. It makes me feel close to her.”

“Oh.” He opens the crisper drawer, takes out an apple, closes the fridge.

“I thought you were hungry.”

“I am. I’m having an apple.”

“I thought you wanted that chicken casserole.”

“So did I, but . . . it’s congealed.”

“You can heat it in the microwave.”

“No, thanks. This is fine.”

You weren’t hungry at all, she thinks, watching him wash the apple at the sink.

In all the years they’ve been married, he’s never been a midnight snacker. If anything, she’s the one who gets up and roots around the fridge in the wee hours.

Besides, when she served the chicken casserole the neighbor dropped off for their dinner, he picked at it. The recipe was probably straight off the label of a can of cream soup, and Keith—who works for the department of animal and food sciences at the university—isn’t big on packaged foods as ingredients for anything.

She’d bet anything that he has his car keys in his pocket. He was probably going to sneak out of the house like a wayward teenager, probably thinking he could rendezvous with . . . whoever . . . and be back at dawn.

Sorry, pal, she thinks, watching him crunch into the apple. Guess I foiled your plan.

At last Landry hears the garage door going up.

Rob is home, thank goodness. He might not understand about Meredith, but he’ll listen patiently, and he’ll care. Or at least pretend to.

“Which one is she?” he’ll ask, never able to tell her online friends apart when she talks about them.

If Landry explains, “She’s the older woman who lives in Ohio,” or “She’s the one who writes the Pink Stinks blog,” he’ll murmur as if he knows who she means, but he won’t. He’ll be sympathetic, though he won’t understand how the loss of a woman she’s never met can hit so hard.

That’s how he reacted in January, when Nell died.

She, too, was a blogger. She lived in England.

“Whoa Nellie died today,” Landry told Rob when he walked in the door that night.

Concern immediately etched his face. “Who?”

“My friend Nell. Whoa Nellie. That’s the name of her blog.”

The concern dissipated and she could see the wheels turning: No one I know. No one in real life.

Landry can hear him in the kitchen, going through his nightly ritual: electronic beeping as he sets the alarm on the panel beside the door, water running as he washes his hands at the sink, the fridge door opening and closing as he grabs a bottle of water, footsteps creaking the wide old floorboards as he makes his way through the dining room, calling, “Anybody home?”

“In here.”

He walks into the living room. Tanned, lean, and handsome, he’s wearing khakis and a golf shirt, carrying his briefcase and a garment bag containing the suit he’d worn to work this morning.

“What’s going on?” he asks, setting the bags on a chair and walking over to her lamplit reading nook. “Where are the kids?”

“Tucker’s playing video games at Jake’s. Addie’s at a movie with her friends. She’s going to pick him up at ten and drive him home.”

“So you’re here all by your lonesome?” He perches on the arm of her chair and kisses the top of her head. “Why are all the shutters closed?”

She follows his gaze to the wall of windows facing the bay. Ordinarily, they don’t bother to draw the plantation shutters at night. The boardwalk is sparsely traveled after dark, and though anyone out there would ostensibly have a clear view into the house, it’s not, typically, a troubling thought.

Tonight is not typical.

“I just . . . I didn’t want to sit here thinking that anyone could see in,” she admits to Rob.

“You feeling okay?”

“Not really.”

Feeling him stiffen, she reads his mind, quickly saying, “No, not that. Physically, I’m fine.”