Chapter 5: The Front Lawn

I did not call the police to get my daughter back.

I drove to my own front gate, got out and walked up the drive on foot.

It was six in the evening, and the whole street was outside.

Dalton had called the neighbors.

I knew it the moment I saw them.

Half a dozen neighbors stood on their lawns with coffee and phones, pretending to water flowers.

A man at the corner house held his phone up and filmed.

Dalton stood on our front porch in shirtsleeves, with Poppy on his hip.

He had dressed her in the yellow dress she hated.

He had wiped her face and combed her hair.

He looked exactly the way he did on every magazine cover the city had printed of him.

"Em," he called, his voice warm and sad. "Thank God you came. I was so afraid you wouldn't."

The neighbors turned toward me.

Ansel stayed at the gate with his hands in his pockets.

I had asked him to.

I walked up the drive alone.

Each step, a phone followed me.

I knew exactly what they were waiting for.

They wanted the wife who cried.

They wanted the woman who screamed at the porch and demanded her daughter and lost.

I had practiced my face in the truck for forty minutes.

"Hello, Dalton," I said.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps and did not climb them.

"Poppy," I said. "Come here, baby."

Poppy squirmed in his arms.

"Mommy!"

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Perfect Husband's Darkest Secret from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.