A sound behind her caught Jen short.
“Stop it,” Livvy whispered. She was standing a few feet away, her arms hugging herself; she’d approached so quietly that they hadn’t heard her. “Please. Stop talking about it.”
Jen pulled her into her arms, shushing her, smoothing her hair. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Daddy and I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Just do what they want,” Livvy pleaded. “Don’t let Daddy try to fight with them.”
As Jen comforted her, she thought she heard voices up above and felt the vibrations of footsteps through the basement floor. It had to be her mind playing tricks on her. In the moments since she first saw the strangers standing in her bedroom door, it was as though the edges of her mind were disintegrating, like a tablet dissolving in water. The core was still there—her rational mind, her focus on her family—but how long could she sustain it?
And in a way, it hadn’t started upstairs, today, with the arrival of this threat. Sid’s death. Sarah’s note. Ted’s evasiveness. And even before that—his job loss, Livvy’s hostility...what had happened to her perfect family, the beautiful home she had created so carefully for all of them? What had she done to invite all these destructive forces in?
She was doing her best, trying to be strong, but she was beginning to imagine the walls cracking, the house bearing down on them, old sins from the past clamoring to come back.
Chapter Seven
Livvy fell asleep first. Jen figured it was her body’s way of shutting down in the face of her terror. Jen covered her with one of the quilts and turned her attention to Teddy, who had finally gotten bored with the laundry when the wash cycle ended.
It had to be past his bedtime. Jen tried to get him to lie down on the couch, but he kept sitting up and fussing with his covers. Jen stroked his soft, downy hair and sang to him, and eventually his hand fell against his chest and his breathing grew steady and slow. She covered him with a second quilt, butterflies appliqued onto its square blocks, the colors faded to the palest greens and oranges and pinks. She had a vague memory of the quilt from her childhood, a time when her mother had used it for her own bed, after Sid left.
Ted was sitting in one of the old dining room chairs holding a spool of copper wire. Jen remembered seeing the wire in one of the jumbled bins of hardware and tools on the shelves above the workbench. The wire had become loose and slipped off the spool in tangled coils, and Ted was methodically working out the knots, rewinding it carefully around the spool.
Jen watched him for a few moments, feeling her gut contract and her breath go shallow until finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. “What in heaven’s name are you doing?”
Ted didn’t answer her for a moment. He wrapped a few more coils around the spool, then set it carefully—gently, as though it were something precious—on the coffee table. He didn’t look at her, pulling at a loose thread in the seam of his pants and clearing his throat. “Jen, there’s something I need to tell you—”
The door opened at the top of the stairs. “Oh, God,” Jen whispered. She accidentally dragged the quilt halfway off Teddy as she scrambled off the couch. He mumbled in his sleep.
“Don’t move.” Dan descended the stairs, slowly, holding a garbage bag in one hand and his gun in the other. When he reached the base of the stairs, he looked around the room, then let the bag drop to the floor with a muffled thud. “Here’s food. And I threw a few of the kid’s toys in, too.”
“Wait,” Jen said. She searched Dan’s face. His beard grew in unevenly, with a few bare patches that looked like he’d taken an indifferent swipe with a razor before giving up, more pepper than salt. Her father had that look, when he first came back from Alaska. He never made much of an effort at grooming. “Couldn’t you just let the kids go? They won’t say anything, they’re—”
He held up a hand to stop her. “Not going to happen, okay, so let it fucking drop. Trust me, it’ll go easier.”
He backed slowly up the stairs, one hand on the rail, finding his footing a little clumsily, moving with the bearing of a middle-aged man who got too little exercise. Then he was gone, the door closing behind him.
Jen stood motionless for a moment before bending to pick up the trash bag. It was one of the black lawn bags, the good ones. She upended it carefully on the rug, and four water bottles rolled out. Jen set them on the coffee table and shook out the rest of the food. Juice boxes, half a dozen of the little ones Jen sent to preschool with Teddy. A box of Triscuits. Another, half-full of cheddar goldfish. A mesh bag of those little round wax-covered cheese wheels, still cold from the fridge. Bruised fruit—a couple of bananas and three pears.
Jen picked up a pear, remembering choosing it from the bin at Whole Foods—was it just yesterday? She’d chosen the Bosc because the other ones were so hard and green, like they’d never ripen, and she’d come home and arranged them in the white ceramic bowl on the counter.
“You hungry?” Ted picked up the Triscuits, tore open the box.
“Are you kidding?”
Ted paused and stared at her. “Look, Jen, I’m not the enemy here.”
“I get that. But how can you eat?” Her own stomach had growled in protest, and she hadn’t eaten since taking Teddy to Jamba Juice after preschool, an outing that seemed like it had taken place days ago, not just hours earlier. But the thought of food was impossible.
Ted looked down at the cracker in his hand. “I’m...I just thought we should eat something.”
He looked so lost, and Jen wished he’d lie to her again, like he had before. Anything to stop her mind from chasing itself in desperate circles. She should never have come down on him so hard when he was only trying to keep their spirits up.
But she’d questioned him then, and now she’d done it again, eroding his strength right in front of her eyes. It was all wrong. Her job was to bolster him, to help him be the strong one, to help him take care of them all.
But the poison was in her mind, in her imagination. She kept getting flashes of the dark schemes the men upstairs might have in mind. Especially the young one. He seemed unbalanced, like someone who could hurt others without feeling remorse. Like he might enjoy it.
The way he looked at Livvy, his gaze sharpening and his mouth going tight, and she didn’t even know what he was seeing. When he looked at her daughter, did he imagine tearing her clothes off her? Doing things to her, making her do things—
Jen let out a whimper of terror, unable to stop the terrifying parade of images. Ted dropped the cracker on the coffee table and reached for her. “Honey. Jen. What is it?”
“It’s Ryan. I just don’t trust him. With Livvy. I mean, didn’t you see him watching her? When he pulled her head back—when he touched her with his gun? Even if what you said about Dan is true, even if he just wants to take our things and leave, how’s he going to stop Ryan if he wants to...” She couldn’t bear to say it, to name her fear.
“Dan’s not going to let things get out of control. He’s in charge here. There’s no way he’d risk that. Anything goes wrong, it takes them both down.”
Jen seized on the hope he was offering her, willing it to be true. “I know it seems like he’s in charge. But what if Ryan tries something, anyway?”
“Dan won’t let that happen.” Ted shook his head. “Look, I know guys like Ryan. There’s one in every locker room. On every team at work. They’re the guys who are always looking for an opening, trying to see what they can get away with. They always end up digging their own hole and getting fired.”
“This isn’t an office—”
“No, but Dan’s not going to let Ryan get the upper hand. Guys like that are tricky, but they’re weak.”
Jen