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FIFTY-SIX

IT DOESN’T HAPPEN ALL at once. It takes time.

Time, first, sitting absolutely still up in the attic in the near dark with that one flickering lightbulb, staring at those safe-deposit-box keys. Keys literally and metaphorically to things unknown, a different world, a different life, perhaps. I don’t know, not yet. But I do know this: there is no legitimate reason that a person would need five different safe-deposit boxes. But there are plenty of illegitimate reasons.

Then snapping out of my funk and heading back downstairs. Cooking shrimp and risotto for dinner and chopping broccoli and tossing it into a pan with garlic and soy sauce and burning the absolute shit out of my finger.

Then opening my laptop after dinner, the kids off, more likely than not, to their screens, their phones, texting with friends or playing games or watching videos, things on which I would normally crack down as Cop Mom but that tonight provide me with welcome space, solitude, time to think about what I know to be true about my life and what I do not.

The laptop. Not hard to find Prinell Bank online. It’s in Champaign, home of our state’s flagship university and just an hour’s drive from here. David could easily drive there and back in any given day, sneaking away from the pub without my ever knowing it.

And then typing the words Michael Cagnina into a search engine. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that this man, a man I never met, never laid eyes on in the flesh, could be the source of all this crazy stuff happening to our family. I knew he’d been released from prison within the past year. And yes, I always suspected that his former assassin, my former client Silas Renfrow, had escaped that detention center in Rockford.

But no, whether it should have or not, it never once crossed my mind. When I walked away from Howard Shimkus and left Millard Halloway and moved back here to HG, I put anything regarding Michael Cagnina in the rearview mirror. Sure, I heard he was convicted of tax evasion. Everyone in the country heard about that. Beyond that, I had no interest in hearing his or Silas’s name ever again. I had no interest in learning another single fact about any of those people.

But now I do. So I type on my keyboard. I learn. And I think. I think about David, everything I know about him, everything I know about us. An hour that turns into two hours that turns into three.

And finally, it clicks. It sends another burn through my chest, jump-starts my pulse, forces my eyes shut, sends tears slithering down my cheeks once more.

I let them fall for a short time, listening with one ear for any sound of the children coming down the stairs. They can’t see me like this. What this will ultimately mean for them I do not know. I will protect them. That will be job number one — doing anything and everything to protect my children. Even if it costs me everything else.

I put the kids down at nine thirty. Lincoln is restless, wanting Daddy to be here to tuck him in. Grace is more concerned with making sure the unreliable power cord to her iPad is working and that the device is charging overnight, because its battery is very low and she has to take a test on that tablet during first period tomorrow.

I hold my breath through all that, shoving everything else out of my mind, determined to make tonight’s lights-out a routine one, nothing unusual, just the Bowers family doing what the Bowers family does.

Because something tells me that this may be their last night of normal.

And now I will simply wait. I will sit in the family room with a glass of wine. And I will wait for David — or, more accurately, the man who’s always called himself David, who’s been lying to me for more than a dozen years — to come home.