Chapter 6: Week 214

The first thing I heard was a woman crying and saying my name.

It was the housekeeper.

She had come back that afternoon for her phone charger, because Dane had told her the family was away all week.

She heard something scratching behind my son's door and found the key in the hall drawer.

When she opened it, I was face down on the carpet with my hands in ribbons.

"I almost didn't come back," she kept saying in the ambulance. "I almost didn't come back."

I woke up in a hospital bed with tubes in my nose and gauze on both hands.

A doctor told me my lungs were burned and that I would live.

A police officer took my statement while I whispered it.

I told him everything, the canister and the locked door and what Dane had said.

He wrote it down slowly.

"We'll check the house," he said. "Your wife's security system shows nobody else was inside this morning."

"The system was armed from outside," I croaked. "Dane controls it."

He gave me a look I knew.

I had seen it on twelve faces at a dinner table.

On the third day, the door opened.

Joanna came in alone.

Her coat was crooked, and her makeup had run down both cheeks.

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