Chapter 3: The Name on the Screen
Calhoun rejected the call.
He shoved the phone into his pocket and looked at me with the expression of a man trying to decide which lie to tell first.
"Inside," he said.
"We need to go inside."
"We are not going anywhere until you tell me what that photograph is."
The guests had gone quiet.
Baxter's friends stood in a cluster near the back fence, their balloons still bobbing.
Three of the other mothers had moved closer together without seeming to realize it.
"Nora." Calhoun stepped toward me and lowered his voice.
"Please.
Not here."
"You don't get to decide where." I held up the photograph.
The edges were still dripping.
"Who took this picture of our son?"
Hester had brushed the worst of the cake from her dress.
She was watching us the way someone watches a fire they started from a safe distance.
"Tell her," she said pleasantly.
"Or I will."
Calhoun turned on her.
"Stay out of this."
"I've been staying out of this for two years." She folded her hands.
"I'm tired of it."
"Two years." I looked at him.
"Two years of what?"
His phone buzzed again in his pocket.
He didn't move.
"Calhoun.
Two years of what?"
He pressed his eyes shut.
When he opened them, he looked past me, at Baxter, who had stopped crying and was now watching his father with the careful stillness of a child who has learned that stillness is safer than sound.
That detail went through me like a blade.
"When did he learn to do that?" I said quietly.
"When did our six-year-old learn to go quiet and wait?"
"Nora, stop."
"Answer me."
Hester spoke before he could.
"The man in that photograph is not a stranger.
He's been watching this house for eight months.
Calhoun knows exactly who he is.
And he has been paying him."
The yard went so silent I could hear the water still moving in the pool.
I turned to my husband.
"You paid someone to watch our son."
"It's not what it sounds like."
"Then tell me what it sounds like, because right now it sounds like you hired someone to follow a six-year-old child."
He finally pulled the phone from his pocket.
Not to answer it.
To show me the screen.
The name on the missed calls read: MARCUS DELL.
It meant nothing to me.
But the way Calhoun's hand was shaking when he held it out told me it should.
"Who is Marcus Dell?"
Calhoun sat down heavily in one of the patio chairs.
The expensive ones Hester had bought us for our anniversary.
He put his head in his hands.
"He's a private investigator," he said.
"I hired him eighteen months ago."
"To watch Baxter."
"To watch you."
The pool filter hummed.
A balloon drifted loose from the fence and floated up over the roofline.
"To watch me," I repeated.
"And then things changed." He looked up.
"And I redirected him.
To watch the house.
To watch Baxter specifically.
Because I found out something and I didn't know how to tell you, and I needed to know that he was safe while I figured it out."
"What did you find out?"
He looked at his mother.
Something passed between them.
Old and practiced and deeply familiar.
"Tell her," Hester said again.
But this time her voice had changed.
The pleasure was gone.
What replaced it was something that looked, almost, like fear.
"She has to know, Calhoun.
It's gone too far."
He looked back at me.
"Baxter isn't in danger from a stranger," he said.
May you like
"He's in danger from someone who already knows him.
Someone who has been inside this house."
