She reached for her notepad; she could start making plans instead of sitting around being useless. Retrieving a pen from the desk drawer, she pulled her notepad toward her. She wouldn’t have discovered the words etched on the pad if her fingers hadn’t grazed the deep grooves a pen had made in the notepad, a pen struggling to pull ink from its near-empty supply. She lifted the notepad to the dim blue light of the computer and tilted it to make out the words. She could see it had been a list and was about to dismiss it when she realized she could make out a name: Lisa Sharpe. Winnie didn’t know anyone named Lisa Sharpe. In fact, she didn’t know any Lisas at all. There was a longer name printed below that, but she could only make out the first name, Daisy, and part of the last name: Sawat.

She wondered if maybe Samuel had been using this computer. He had his own, but sometimes...

Out of curiosity, Winnie opened a browser on the computer and went to Facebook. Sam had an account—very restricted, everything approved by her. She found the little box where his friends were and typed the name Lisa Sharpe into the search engine. Nada, zilch. Lisa was a name common to Winnie’s generation, not Samuel’s.

She switched on the overhead light and studied the imprint of handwriting on the page. Had she examined it more carefully straightaway, she would have seen right away that it wasn’t Samuel’s.

And then, her fingers pressing compulsively into the little grooves the pen had dug into the paper, Winnie was suddenly sure her husband was cheating on her. Nigel, she thought. Could he...? Winnie spun around in her chair so that it was facing the family room. She was being silly and irrational. Why would she think Nigel was cheating on her just because a woman’s name was written on her notepad? There could be a perfectly good explanation.

She Googled Lisa Sharpe instead. Chewing on her lip, she frowned at the screen, wishing the computer could hurry up and do its work because her stomach was a mess. She thought about going upstairs to find her Tums, but then her computer churned out the results, and Winnie no longer remembered her heartburn because her brain was exploding.

Lisa Sharpe. In the photo, she was wearing a red-striped dress, her blond hair up in a ponytail. She held a ragged-looking Barbie doll up to her face for the picture, head tilted toward the doll, smiling sweetly. She had been two years old, taken from her front yard in 2008. The toddler had been in her swing when her mother stepped inside to get her cell phone. When she returned, no less than sixty seconds later (or so she said), Lisa was gone.

Winnie read through the articles, her confusion mounting—but not nearly as high as her fear. Why would Nigel look up this child? This Lisa Sharpe? She could think of only one reason her husband would be interested in a case like this, and that was something she didn’t want to think about.

Lisa was never found. Twelve years later, and her mother still held Facebook Live vigils for her every Sunday. Winnie stood abruptly, ripping the sheet of paper from the notepad and crumpling it in her fist. No, no, no, she wanted to say, but her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth, dry and useless. How could he? Or more importantly; why was he? And why now?

      15

   JUNO

Juno spent the next forty-eight hours confined to the crawl space as the Crouches passed around the stomach flu. It wasn’t the longest she’d been down there, but she was less prepared this time. With Nigel sleeping in the den downstairs, she hadn’t been able to risk sneaking up to replenish her supplies. Her waste bucket was in bad need of emptying, and last she counted, she had just five water bottles leaning against the wall opposite her bed.

The weather dropped to thirty-nine degrees, and all she had left for food was a sleeve of saltines. She’d been careless; her focus—her obsession, she corrected herself—had been finding out the truth about Sam, and in the meantime, she’d forgotten to take care of herself. Again.

Her side was aching, despite the layers she’d put beneath her sleeping bag. She rolled onto her back, groaning. She tried to change her position every twenty minutes; it helped with the pain. Years ago, Juno had a patient with lupus—Cynnie Gerwyn. And who could forget a name like that? But what Juno remembered most about Cynnie was the butterfly mark on her face and the way her thirty-year-old frame was bent and warbled like a wire hanger. She distinctly remembered feeling sorry for the woman. It would be years before Juno was diagnosed herself.

Cynnie had gone on to have a kidney transplant, and Juno had seen her twice weekly after that as she worked her way through a depression brought on by her disease. Back then, Cynnie had been just a client, a woman who paid Juno to listen to her talk, but she’d thought about her more and more since her own diagnosis, wondering what Cynnie had done with her life since the fresh kidney.

Juno moved her hands from where they were pressed between her knees to keep warm and held them close to her face; they were blue. Not from the cold—not yet, anyway. The swollen, blue hands were a sign of her sickness. She bent them at the knuckles and flinched when her joints popped painfully. Juno didn’t have so much as an aspirin down in her cave, not with the entire Crouch family quarantined.

She returned her hands to their place between her knees and wished she were already dead. And she might be by the end of the week: her immune system worked like a bunch of fat old ladies with gout. There was nothing to do but think as she lay underneath the Crouches’ house, below the humming bodies of the family who owned it. She wasn’t ashamed of what she was doing. When it came to survival, in Juno’s opinion, anything was acceptable. She’d watched them, wanted them, and found a home with them.

By the time the Crouches purged the virus and left the Turlin Street house to return to their outside worlds, Juno hadn’t eaten anything in three days. She wasn’t hungry; she wasn’t anything, really—barely existing outside of the pain in her body. She had to talk herself into sitting up, and then slowly she crawled forward, the exertion of leaving her nest enough to leave her gasping for breath. The smell of her body made her gag, and she realized that at some point she’d wet herself, probably in the middle of her pain-hazed sleep. It took her close to an hour to get through the trapdoor where she rested briefly in Hems Corner before hauling herself to her feet.

The house smelled like bleach and flowers. Winnie had done a number with the de-germing. It was terrible, but not as terrible as her own smell, she decided. She very slowly made it to the bathroom to relieve her bladder, and then, stripping off her clothes, Juno walked naked to the washing machine, dumping her things in. She didn’t have the energy to go down for the rest, but there was a new donation bag sitting by the door. She took the first thing she found on top, a shapeless T-shirt and butterfly leggings, and pulled them on. She walked to the kitchen, feeling rather gloomy.

A darkness had settled over her thoughts as she lay in her filth. The past always came to visit when she was too still. She headed for the sink where, with no joy, she opened the tap and drank until she was heaving. She didn’t bother with eating yet; her stomach was deciding how it felt about so much water at one time. She had to wash, but washing was a want and eating was a need, so supplies had to come first. Juno paused at the door to the pantry, swaying slightly. She was an impulsive bitch, an irrational bitch, but she wasn’t the type of bitch to make the same mistake twice. Grabbing without thinking, she took as much food as she could carry, armload by armload, until she was weak from the effort. Dumping it all down the trapdoor into the crawl space, she heard the satisfying thuds of cans and bags and even the log of tofu she’d taken from the fridge. Her clothes in the dryer, she headed upstairs to take a bath.