This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2023 by Chandler Baker

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781662514890 (digital)

Cover design by Faceout Studio, Spencer Fuller

Cover illustration by Phantom City Creative

“I think Daddy might be a bad guy,” says Odette Strauss, her breath as minty fresh as a toothpaste commercial. Her head rests lightly on the pillow on the bed of her older sister, June, which she likes much better than her own because the sheets aren’t littered with crumbs of granola bars and Goldfish crackers and other things she’s not supposed to eat in her room.

It’s well past Odie’s bedtime. June’s long brown hair fans across the pillow beside her.

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” June says in her Big Sister voice. “It’s not kind.”

“Why should I always have to be kind?” asks Odie.

June’s Popsicle toes slide between Odie’s feet, which Odie doesn’t like, not because they’re cold, but because they’re feet.

“Because Daddy loves us,” says June.

Only, Odie doesn’t see what that’s got to do with anything.

FIVE HOURS EARLIER

Rachel Strauss shuffles the papers in front of her into a neat pile. The last slide of her PowerPoint presentation lingers on the projector screen: THE INTERSECTION OF BURIAL CUSTOMS AND CLIMATE CHANGE: RELIGION & POLICY IN THE ERA OF SCIENTIFIC INSTABILITY.

The men around the table take a long time getting to their feet. They’re old, some born that way, some having grown into it properly. Rachel imagines moths chewing up their crotches.

“Brilliant. Fantastic, Dr. Strauss, really.” Professor Grover smiles, flashing his tobacco-stained teeth at Rachel, beaming like a beloved grandfather.

“Thank you, Dr. Grover,” she says.

On their way out, she hears Professor Gusev grumbling to Professor Komarov—together, a pair of Russian academics. Or spies. “Apparently they’re handing out Dickerson Grants to anyone these days.”

“Except to you, Dmitri.” Rachel clicks off the projector. “Apparently.”

She can’t help it. Rachel loves fucking with the old guys.

She burrows in her purse for her cell phone and finds that her husband, Sam, tried calling during the presentation. A year ago she would have known in her bones that Sam would never carp about Rachel’s accolades behind her back, but now, well, she’s not so sure.

She reminded Sam of her presentation this morning before she left the house, and it irritates her that he called while she was lecturing. But she knows he’s dealing with a lot. Or perhaps too little, depending on how you look at it. She considers texting him—the girls should be home in another forty minutes—but then she glances up just in time to see Dean Gutman, the best dressed of her small audience, disappear out the conference room door.

“Shit.” Rachel smashes the rest of her folders into her public radio tote and slings both it and her purse over one shoulder. “Dean Gutman! Dean Gutman!” she calls after his wool sports coat and follows him, stopping short when she sees him parked at the end of the hall, engaged in a deep, unhurried discussion, as career academics so often are.

Dean Gutman glances up.

“Sorry.” She cringes, hanging back. “But can I have a word when you finish up?”

Gutman nods, and Rachel waits, trying to mask her impatience, for seven minutes. She counts.

“Sorry,” she repeats, even though she has generally disabused herself of the feminine habit of apology. “I was just wondering if you had a chance to read my husband’s paper?”

If it weren’t for his kind green eyes, anyone might mistake Dean Gutman for a hedge-fund guy. Rachel stands in front of him, shifting her weight, ten times more self-conscious than when she’d been explaining her complicated research methodology earlier.

“What I could,” Gutman tells her. “It’s good. It’s not, you know . . .” He stares at a point over Rachel’s head, and she tries very hard not to finish the sentence: not great. There it is, too late.

She considered offering to read Sam’s paper three weeks ago, just another pair of eyes. She could give him notes. That’s what peers do. It’s a thing—it’s done. But every evening that she considered the idea, she imagined Sam’s contemptuous growl in response. And besides, she wasn’t exactly seeking out his feedback anymore. She used to practice her research presentations in front of him. He used to be her first audience. But the thought of giving her husband an excuse to rip her work to shreds, under the guise of helping her, now feels about as unappealing as foot fungus. And more to the point, what can he really provide her anyway?

“There’s just not a lot of funding available in theoretical philosophy at the moment,” says Dean Gutman. “At least not here.”

“Right. I understand.” This is not good news, and it somehow doesn’t help that it’s the news she’s been expecting.

Dean Gutman sighs. “Rachel . . . we’re very proud that you’re a member of our faculty, and deeply excited about the career you have ahead and the attention it could bring us. I’ll . . . talk to a couple more donors about Sam. I’ll keep an ear to the ground. If anything comes up, I’ll be the first to let you know.”

Outside the air is sweet and crisp. Leaves stick to her lace-up boots as Rachel walks the footpath through campus, past redbrick buildings and iron benches, past an empty granite podium where a thirteen-foot bronze statue, The Pioneer, stood until student protestors toppled it over late last year.

Cold crawls through the sleeves of her sweater and its too-loose neck hole. As she walks, the campus bleeds into the town of Eugene, Oregon. Hippies mix with college kids, and it’s not always easy for Rachel to tell them apart. Everyone has an agenda; everyone has a sign.

Out of alleyways, between buildings, and even through the shattered window of one shop front, the remnants of a landslide peek through, thick mud and clay and shards of rock. A pale-blue campus home has cracked at the roof, half its first floor sunk into the ground where the paved drive cratered.

When Rachel reaches the parking lot, the rear bumpers of a handful of cars stick out of the old mud and rubble, as if entombed. Cleanup efforts have been slowed by heavy rains, though most residents at least have heat and water again.

She reaches for her keys but can’t remember: Did she put them in her tote or in her purse? Her phone buzzes again, and she feels a sudden rush of annoyance when—

A snarl behind her prickles her spine. She spins in time to jump back as a set of sharp teeth gnashes inches from her leg. A golden retriever lunges at the end of a leash, frothy spittle flying from its jowls. The jogger at the other end strains against the force of the dog’s haunches.

“Murray! Murray! Quit that,” commands the owner. The retriever’s bark pierces the air.

Rachel’s hand flies to her heart, and the breath presses out from her lungs in one giant whoosh. “Jesus.”

“Sorry!” says the jogger over the dog’s hoarse woofing. “He’s the sweetest dog. He’d never hurt anyone, I swear.”

Rachel gives the jogger a disapproving side-eye. “Seems like a delight.”

She’s never had a dog, but it seems that everyone thinks their dog is the sweetest until it bites someone’s face off.

The house is a charming old Oregon farmhouse at the end of a long gravel road, sitting in the center of a postage stamp of grass and hemmed in by towering Douglas firs—a picturesque pit stop on the way to exactly nowhere.

Inside the house, Sam sets his mug of milky coffee on a stack of books he wrote during a different life, or at least in a different city. Dried paint stains fleck his old Princeton crewneck, now dingy and frayed at its tapered wrists. He plugs the vacuum cord into the wall, considering, only briefly, whether to hang himself with it. Progress.

The vacuum emits a high-pitched roar as he pushes it around the area rug, making crescent shapes, then doubling back and erasing them. His mind is on tonight. There’s an order to these things, a way that events must unfold. And yet Rachel didn’t answer his call. She must be on her way by now. She should be here any minute. In fact . . .

Did he hear something?

Sam cocks his head like a dog. On some level, he realizes that his mannerisms have gotten stranger the longer he’s been left to his own devices. No one to bear witness out here in the middle of nowhere. No one to track his lonely devolution into something feral. At least not during the long daylight hours, when he’s left to rot in the mind-numbing domestic hell of this godforsaken refurbished farmhouse.

The framed family photos are rattling on the wall. And behind the blinds, a shadow grows into a full silhouette.

Sam yanks the cord from the wall. The roar cuts off, replaced by an insistent knocking on the windowpane. A thin shaving of unease slithers between Sam’s shoulder blades. Who could it be at this time of day? He takes heavy steps toward the front door and peels open the weather seal, revealing a middle-aged man with 1980s-style Coke-bottle glasses and a thick mustache.

“Can I help you?” Sam asks.

“Ah, didn’t mean to startle you there.” Behind the thick lenses, the man has filmy eyes. “My name’s Harold. I’m your Airbnb guest, here to stay in that cute little house you’ve got there in the back.” The man wears a flannel shirt and work boots, not the look of their typical renters, who tend to be upscale nature lovers with REI memberships, looking for an excuse to drink craft beer and build a fire. “Hey,” the man says. “You know, I tried using my phone to open the, ah, keypad, like the instructions said, but it wouldn’t open.”

“We didn’t list the cottage for rent this week.” Sam is gruff without meaning to be. Out of practice.

“Ah, well, that’s where you’re wrong. You did, see, ’cus I rented it.”

Another blip of anxiety pings Sam. He is tall and rugged, but this man, Harold, is built like a lumberjack. “You must have gotten the dates mixed up. It happens.”

“Let’s see. Well, ah, I guess I can pull up the confirmation email here.” Harold fumbles with his phone, fat-thumbed. Sam waits impatiently. “Hey, you mind if I come in?” Harold asks. “Might be able to see better.”

It’s late afternoon. The sun is no longer a visible orb, but a golden feeling in the sky. Rachel really should be home by now. Sam glances up the road. Where is she? She wouldn’t have forgotten. She couldn’t have forgotten. Why hadn’t she returned his call?

“That’s okay.” Sam blocks the doorway with his body. “I don’t mind the fresh air.”

“Ah, see?” Harold produces the email. “Right here. October 9. That’s today, right?”

It is. Am I the Asshole? Sam thinks. As the subreddit goes.

He sighs. “That’s a mistake, then. Something must have happened on the website. I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s not available for rent at the moment.”

Harold looks like a very large child who’s been disappointed on Christmas morning. “Someone’s already staying there?”

“No,” says Sam. “I’m doing some work on the place.” Then it strikes him. Dennis Rader. That’s who Harold reminds him of! He looks like BTK, the serial killer. Fantastic.

“I see.” Harold shrugs. “Listen, you know, I don’t mind. Pardon your dust and whatnot. I get it. No big deal. I’m not going to write a bad Yelp review or what have you.”

But Sam’s mind can’t be changed. There’s an order to these things. A way they must go. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to find a place in town.”

If she were here, Rachel would scold him for not being nicer. Other husbands offer to help women lift their luggage into overhead bins, she would say. Other husbands enjoy other husbands. But Rachel’s not here. Where the hell is she?

“Sorry for the mix-up,” Sam adds. “Another time. On the house.” There. He tried. In good conscience, he tried.

“The problem is . . .” Harold blocks the door before Sam can close it. “I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the motels and things have NO VACANCY signs and whatnot, on account of the mudslide and the flooding looks like you all had not too far back, isn’t that right?”

“Eugene’s big enough, you’ll find somewhere,” Sam says.

“Must have been scary, eh? Makes you think, doesn’t it? Could have been worse, though. You been having problems with wildlife yet? Getting pushed in toward the populated areas?”

“Some. Yeah.” Sam doesn’t elaborate. The house had been spared from the sludge that had poured down the hillsides and into town during the early-summer rains. “Sorry . . .” Sam attempts to excuse himself. “I was just starting dinner.” He softens. “Listen, send us the receipt. We’ll reimburse you for your trouble.”

Harold dips his chin and nods. “Okay, then. That’s all right. I understand.”

Sam watches through the window, feeling better when the man’s ’89 F-250 reverses out of the driveway, a gun rack fastened to back window. He doesn’t like the uneasy guilt of having turned someone away, but he consoles himself with the thought that, were it not an honest mistake, he might have made up the same excuse to keep the man from staying on the premises. Some deep animal intuition spoke to Sam: Something off about that one, something a little wrong in the head. Oh, well. What’s done is done.

Sam cuts through the backyard, over the tall grass and across the beds of dried pine needles, where he’s recently seen white-tailed deer nosing the ground for berries. He reaches the cottage, nestled into a thin row of trees. A wall of earth has taken out some of the trunks just behind it, depositing roots and branches in a thick, scarred path. Another twelve feet and the mud would have reached the foundation of the cottage. A close call, close enough that Rachel and Sam started moving things out, and they’ve still only moved half of them back in.

Sam stands at the door. The electronic keypad is the cottage’s only technological amenity. No Wi-Fi, not even a TV. It’s one of the selling points. No one will find you out here! Sam had written in the Airbnb listing.

He presses his phone against the door, and it clicks open.

Inside, the cottage is rustic and neat. Gingham curtains frame the windows. Sam’s sneakers make soft sounds on the plank floors. On the gas stove, he finds the teakettle, opens the top, and fishes out a pair of padlocks. Then he tips the whole thing over, and two keys slide into his open palm.

Then he hears the whine of a school bus’s brakes. The girls have beaten Rachel home, he thinks. Events as they have been set forth in his mind begin to shift, the land once again sliding beneath his feet.

Nobody says anything at dinner. It’s all forks scraping on plates and fabric whispering on the dining chairs. June’s eyes shift between her parents.

“I thought you were leaving on your trip before we got home?” she eventually asks her mother.

“My flight got delayed.” Rachel sniffles and dabs her napkin on her forehead. She takes one small bite of her hamburger and sets it down. Her skin looks slippery. June spots a glob of makeup congealed at her mother’s hairline.

June shrugs. “Oh.” She reaches for the last of the Tater Tots, but Odie is quicker and slides the scoop onto her own plate, lickety-split, before June even gets a chance. Not fair. Like always.

June feels the familiar burn of righteous anger as she chews her Caesar salad, slowly and methodically as a big old milk cow. Odie grins and chews her Tater Tots with her mouth open.

June grins back. “Odie got called to Principal Bryant’s again.”

“No fair, June! You tattler!”

June rolls her eyes, already feeling a little better about the Tater Tot situation. “There’s a note in your backpack, dummy.”

Sam’s fork clangs on his plate, and June’s skin jumps. “Christ,” her father shouts at Odie. “What was it this time?”

Suddenly June wishes, maybe a little bit, that she hadn’t said anything. But only a little bit.

Odie won’t look at their father, so he asks June.

“She squirted ketchup on a girl’s crotch.”

“How’d you know to do that, Odie?” Rachel asks, not sounding mad. Mom never gets mad at Odie, which is another thing that drives June crazy.

“I saw blood in your underwear,” mutters Odie.

June slaps her hand over her mouth. “Ew! You’re so gross, Odie.” She points at her sister’s face. “You’re disgusting.” Sometimes Odie even forgets to flush the toilet.

Odie ignores June and grabs their mother’s arm possessively. “Is that how come you’re sick, Mommy? Is that what’s wrong?”

Rachel’s forehead and cheeks are red. She might have a fever. June longs to take care of her, to bring her a glass of water and a wet rag, to hear her mom tell her what a good girl she is. She doesn’t understand why more credit isn’t given in this family for being good. Odie gets all the attention, and everyone knows she’s not good at all.

“No, honey, no.” Rachel pushes away Odie’s hands, which she probably didn’t even wash before dinner.

“You have to control yourself, young lady,” Sam growls, and June feels a small quiver of triumph because Odie hates being called “young lady.” “You have to control your temper. Do you want to be known as a bad kid?”

“She called me Weirdy McWeirderson, and all the other kids started saying it, too.” Odie’s breaths are getting slurpy. June knows what’s coming if her father doesn’t let it go, and she knows that when Odie’s acting this way, he won’t let it go. When it’s just the two of them, she can deal with Odie. She can stop the train from crashing, defuse the bomb, tame the lion.

Sam looks at the ceiling, and June knows that if he looks at Odie, he’ll get even madder. “You want a reputation for being a . . . a troublemaker?”

And just like that, Odie’s big feelings explode into a wild scream of earsplitting fury. June squirms in her seat. The worst part about being an older sister is the sinking feeling that everything is always somehow her fault.

Rachel rolls her suitcase into the foyer and sets down her briefcase. Wisps of hair stick to the back of her neck. She finds the familiar shape of her husband bent over the sink, doing the evening’s dishes.

Sensing her arrival, he scrubs a plate that much harder. “You have to stop making me the bad guy.”

“You’re not the bad guy. It’s just that you’re not accomplishing what you think you are,” Rachel says gently. “The therapist said to give energy to her good behavior and ignore the rest. You act like you weren’t—”

“So no consequences? That’s what we’re doing now?” Sam’s voice sounds like thunder. “This New Agey bullshit that’s getting us absolutely nowhere? She doesn’t respect authority, Rachel.” He whips the dish towel onto the counter, frustrated—or disgusted—with her.

“She’s special, Sam. You have to appreciate her for who she is, or else it’s going to be a long eighteen years.”

She should have called him back earlier. She should have let him know she was running late, but she was advocating on his behalf. She chased down the dean for him. Of course, she can’t say that out loud. That would only make it worse.

“We’re her parents,” he says. “Act like one.”

She bristles. She is acting like a parent. A proper, good parent. She’s sure of it, and yet she knows enough to know to tread lightly. But how long can she really bear to walk on eggshells around her husband? Can she do this for the rest of her life? She hates herself for even considering the question.

“The girl called her weird, Sam.” Rachel shrugs. “She stood up for herself. Good for her.”

“The other parents talk about her.” Sam’s head drops. “You’re not at pickup, you don’t know.”

“And what exactly is that supposed to mean?” See? She can be testy, too. He doesn’t have the market cornered.

When Odie’s brain starts working again, she finds herself in her bedroom with no memory of how she got there. Her ears ring, and her legs feel boneless and jiggly, washed out in the aftermath of another epic tantrum. She kind of likes the way she feels brand new after one—wobbly, like a newborn baby. But with it comes the icky feeling that everyone hates her, worst of all Mommy.

Odie sneaks down the stairs on tiptoes with a picture colored especially for Mommy, who loves Odie’s art so much she says she would pay good money for it.

The grown-ups are talking in the kitchen, and usually when they hear Odie coming, they get quiet straightaway. Sometimes Odie worries they’ll break up, like Parker’s parents in Ms. Monroe’s class. His parents told him love isn’t forever, and they had to move to separate houses. When Odie remembers that, she starts to get another Big Feeling.

“You want me to feel bad, that’s it?” she hears her mother say. “You’ll be okay as long as I go around feeling like a shitty mom?”

Odie blinks, watching them through the crack of the slightly open door. She watches and watches and watches. Nothing happens, so she slinks over to where Mommy’s suitcase rests near the front door. She unzips it, and at first she doesn’t believe what she finds, but then she opens the briefcase balanced atop the roller bag and finds the same thing in there: nothing.

Both bags are empty, which makes no sense to Odie. You always have to pack a toothbrush and underwear and pj’s when you’re doing a sleepover. Mommy has said so herself.

Something shatters on the kitchen floor. The noise startles Odie, and she has to stop herself from screaming because she’s supposed to be upstairs thinking about what she’s done. She zips up the luggage as quickly as she can, nervous about what might have broken and whether their father will be even madder.

She imagines glass on the floor, Mommy hurt. But then she hears a laugh. A normal, ha-ha sort of laugh, like when Odie tells a funny knock-knock joke, so maybe everything is fine, after all.

Rachel and Sam stare at the aftermath between them. A ceramic plate detonated on the floor, and porcelain shards and white dust are everywhere. The plate was part of the Emma collection from Pottery Barn, and Rachel personally selected it for her bridal registry, thirteen years earlier.

“That was real mature,” Sam deadpans.

The Emma plates are slowly going extinct in the Strauss home.

A wave of dizziness slithers into Rachel’s inner ear. She manages a watery grin, as if to say, See? It’s not that serious. We don’t have to be this serious. “Have to get you out of your own head somehow,” she says out loud in real life to him.

There. His mouth twitches. A flicker of her husband. Not this grunting caveman that usually masquerades as Sam these days. It doesn’t help to be like this, churlish and always itching for a go at her, she wants to tell him. But she doesn’t have the right to tell him how to process his feelings, how to interact with this new smaller, isolated world in which he now finds himself because of her.

But—sweet victory—she can tell that he saw her, too, in that moment when the plate struck the floor. For a flash. He saw his wife again.

Sam turns his back and resumes washing the dishes. His shoulders are broad and strong, so different from when they’d first met as graduate assistants. Back then, he reminded her of Harry Potter. Now, after eighteen months in Oregon, she has a whole Hemsworth brother on her hands. So not everything about his transformation has been unwelcome.

Suddenly, Sam tenses. Rachel watches cordlike tendons rise in a fan from his neck. “Shit,” he seethes. “Shit.” He dries his hands on his jeans.

“What?” She hates when he gets like this, sullen and uncommunicative. Does he mean to punish her? She tries not to take it personally, but . . .

Sam’s eyes blaze as he strides right past her.

Rachel stands alone in the empty kitchen. What? she repeats to herself. Then she sees it through the window: the pointed ears and coarse scruff of a full-grown wolf, just three or four yards away. The fading sun catches the cinnamon flecks in its otherwise silver coat. The wolf blinks amber eyes, unnervingly still.

Rachel’s heart measures time in her chest. Shit, she thinks. Another gray wolf that shouldn’t be here.

The farmers in the area refer to them as ghost walkers. And though the wolves prefer to dine on chickens and goats, the gray wolf is one of the few species that will, if pressed, deliberately prey on humans. They’ve grown more brazen since the landslide, as small game has moved closer in to civilization, colonizing the churned earth and finding new homes. With small game come larger predators, and the wolf is an apex.

Outside, the wolf’s ears twitch, taking in sounds that Rachel can’t hear. She moves to the sink, feeling the distinct sense that the wolf is tracking her movements. She shudders to think what might happen if Odie or June came face-to-face with a pack, especially now that they’re coming right up to the house.

“Can we name it?”

The sound of Odie’s voice behind her relaxes Rachel. Her daughter’s chestnut hair is its usual mess of tangles, Rachel’s irregular attempts to brush it often as dangerous as combing the fur on a feral cat.

She bends and begins sweeping the remains of her Emma plate into a dustpan. “You can try, but he won’t come when you call him.”

The ceramic shrapnel sounds like a miniature landslide as it plummets into the trash bin.

“Do you want to play a game with me, Mommy?”

In the family room, Rachel and Odie kneel together on the rug, a wooden mancala board on the coffee table between them.

“Your turn,” Rachel prompts. “Remember your strategy.” She points to a single shiny stone on Odie’s side, but Odie can’t resist the allure of the biggest pile at the end. She scoops the flat marbles up and doles them out one by one, landing nowhere useful. “That’s okay. You still cleared a place.”

Odie drops back on her heels with a tiny huff.

Rachel feels the troughs of sweat pooling in the silk fabric beneath her arms. She may have a fever. If not already, then soon. She has underwater legs. She’s picking up her own colored stones when a great boom outside makes her drop one of the marbles into the shag fibers of the rug.

BOOM.

Again.

The shotgun blast echoes through her rib cage and lingers in the air like the outline of a fizzled firework in the night sky.

Odie’s eyes meet Rachel’s. Quickly, Rachel reaches for her daughter’s hand. “It’s okay,” she says. “Just hunters.” The raw tips of Odie’s fingers are rough on Rachel’s own. “Don’t they hurt?” she asks. The nail beds are ragged, with red crescents of dried blood.

Odie’s eyes are big and brown. “It helps me be good, Mommy.” She wrestles her hand away.

Rachel feels woozy. She tries to calculate the timing in her sticky mind, but her thoughts are starting to scramble. Twenty minutes. She needs to leave no later than twenty minutes from now. Just enough time to get the girls settled.

“You know,” she says, mustering her resolve to mother properly, “Daddy loves you. He just . . .” She struggles to find the right words. “I don’t want you to worry. Because . . . because your spirit will be your superpower someday. Just watch.”

Odie eyes her skeptically.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Rachel teases. “Why do you think all those old dusty men listen to me, huh?”

The little girl chews the inside of her cheek. “Mommy, are you going to die?”

Sam has put on a Disney movie. June and Odie zone out on the sofa, snuggled beneath mounds of quilts. They are seven minutes behind schedule, and still Sam lets Rachel kiss the girls goodbye.

“Come on,” he warns.

His wife’s face appears to be melting away from her skull. She’s dripping with tears and regret, and he resents her for it. This is who he is, who she has forced him to become, a man who sees his wife leaking with emotion and thinks, Get on with it already. She clings to June’s hand. She knows what’s coming.

“Enough,” he says. His generosity always gets him into trouble, despite how it may seem, despite what people may think of him. Rachel gently pats the back of June’s hand. Odie eyes her mother sidelong, distrustful.

Rachel slurps in snot and saliva. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, standing.

Sam presses his hand to the small of her back. He has control of her. He is bigger, stronger. He has been chopping wood. Rachel may have the brains, but how long would it take his calloused hands to strangle her until the life drained from her eyes?

He can’t believe the thought. God. See what this does to him?

He guides—no, pushes—Rachel to the door. The screen clacks shut behind them, and the porch lights blink on. The forest surrounding them looks like a black, rippling wall, ominous and alive. Roughly, Sam tosses the suitcase and briefcase onto the lawn, where they tumble over. He’ll deal with them later.

Rachel sinks down onto the steps and rubs her face until her mascara smears. Her skin is sweaty and pink, reeking of uncharacteristic body odor.

“Get up,” Sam commands.

She looks up at him, trembling. He doesn’t meet her eyes.

“You don’t have to do this.” Her voice is small. “It’s me, Sam.”

“I know who you are.” He looks out into the distance.

“Please. Please. Please.”

Of course he’s already made up his mind. They both know what he’s going to do. So this performance of hers only makes him more boorish. “I said get up.”

Rachel ignores his command, so he grabs her by the biceps. She winces as his fingertips grind into muscle and bone. He wants to shoot her words right back in her face: You don’t have to do this. It’s me, Rachel.

He marches her toward the cellar door, where he takes the barest of seconds to look around suspiciously. Who would be out here, though? No one, but still . . .

Sam opens the cellar door and shoves Rachel into the pitch dark.

Music from the movie Encanto blares from the TV. Odie sings along to her favorite song, “We Don’t Talk about Bruno.” June’s got the zombie eyes that she gets every time she watches television.

“Hello? Hello?” Odie waves. No response.

Odie is bored. She saw this movie yesterday. After untangling her feet from the quilt she shares with her sister, she slips out the back door and into the yard, which is so much bigger than the one at her old house. She could get lost in it. Sometimes that’s what she likes about it. The evening is slurping up sunlight, and as Odie looks out, she feels both small and big at the same time.

The porch light illuminates an oval on the grass, and Odie wades through itchy blades that tickle her knees until she reaches the edges of the oval, eventually finding a little river of smooshed grass that seems interesting enough to follow. If she keeps her feet on the flattened bits, she doesn’t even get scratchy. That, too, is interesting. She feels like a detective.

She soon spots streaks of brownish red that look like they have been painted on the grass with a brush. She keeps going. The brushstrokes arc all the way back to the side of the house, and there, around the corner, she finds a dead wolf lying next to the trash bins.

Odie has never seen a dead wolf before. She really wants to put her face in its fluffy fur, just to see what it feels like, but the wolf’s coat is clumpy around a hole of dark red where the blood has thickened and stopped spreading. Odie tilts her head and guesses that its body is as tall as Mommy, which is about two times as big as Odie herself. She sits beside the wolf, wishing that Mommy had let her give it a name. She runs her hand over its neck, pushes on the tips of its pointy teeth with her little finger, pinches its tongue.

And then it breathes.

Hot air whooshes over Odie’s hand, and the smell of dead meat travels up from way down deep in its belly, tickling her nose. A scream sticks inside Odie’s throat, and she scuttles back—bang—right into a trash can, which crashes onto the ground. The big black garbage bags slide out. Odie’s toe catches on the biggest one when she tries to jump over it, and her knee scrapes the ground. It stings so badly she wants to cry, but instead . . . she runs.

The girls are in bed, and Sam Strauss takes a long drag from a highball glass of whiskey as he stares down his own reflection. His wife found the oddly shaped gold wall mirror at a flea market back in New Hampshire, where they lived before Oregon, where they both had jobs, and not just jobs but careers, before it began to seem prudent for the Strauss family to begin crafting a plan for yet another exodus.

The bowed curves of the mirror remind Sam of a woman’s waist. Not his wife’s, mind you.

His eyes are bloodshot. He sees, not for the first time, what he senses his family must see as well. Someone dark and bitter and troubled. Unapproachable. The kindness stripped away like bark. He’s tired of playing the bad cop, outnumbered by the ladies in his life.

A knock on the front door pulls his attention from his haggard reflection. Rachel? he thinks for one impossible second. Because it can’t be Rachel. It actually cannot fucking be Rachel.

Sam sets his glass on the console table and presses his eye to the peephole. His jaw tenses. Shit.

He opens the door, only a crack. A sliver of Harold appears on the other side. “Can I help you?” Sam pats his cell phone through his back pocket. Not that he’s in any position to call the police.

“Hey, sorry to bother you again,” Harold says from the porch.

“Yeah.” Sam keeps one hand on the knob of the door. “Tonight’s really not a good night. I wish I could help you.”

Harold shifts his weight in his clunky steel-toed boots. “Ah, maybe if I could speak to your wife. I was thinking—”

“Sorry. She’s away at a conference.”

“Ah. That’s too bad.” Harold frowns. There’s something juvenile about his mannerisms, but that doesn’t make Sam any more inclined to trust him. “I don’t mean to get off on the wrong foot, but I just think—”

“She’d say the same thing, man,” Sam says, more pointedly. Hasn’t this dude ever heard of “no means no”? An unsettling thought comes to Sam: he didn’t hear Harold’s truck pull up the drive. Nor did he notice headlights. His eyes flit away from Harold, peering out into the night. He doesn’t see the truck anywhere.

“Ah, I see.” Harold folds his arms across his barrel chest. “Where’s the conference, if you don’t mind me asking?”

In fact, Sam does mind. “San Francisco,” he answers anyway.

“Right, very good. I actually, in point of fact . . . well, I should say that your wife is Rachel. Rachel Strauss, isn’t it?”

Sam’s attention sharpens. “I’m sorry, who are you? Harold, right?” He thinks about the shotgun he left leaning against the side of the house, after he shot the wolf and before he went searching for Odie.

“Yeah, you know, I thought I’d surprise her.” Harold grins sheepishly. “Thought she’d get a kick out of my being here, showing up and whatnot.”

Sam’s mind races.

“We’re old friends, if you can believe it.”

Sam could not and would not believe it. “I see . . . well.”

As long as this doesn’t escalate, Sam thinks. Most mentally ill people are harmless, and Rachel has always been a magnet for admirers, especially in her academic field. Look no further than Sam. When he was a graduate assistant, the most promising PhD candidate in his program, tenure had seemed a foregone conclusion. And then he met Rachel, a curious, energetic undergrad who did all her thinking out loud, who clapped when she found something interesting, who made a gray turtleneck look cheery.

Harold leans in, trying to peer behind Sam. “And you’re positive she’s not here?”

“Just me.” Sam feels his lips curl around his teeth. “Listen, Harold. I’ll tell her you stopped by—”

But right then, they both hear feet pattering down the stairs behind Sam.

“Daddy!”

Sam glances over his shoulder to see his ten-year-old daughter scampering down the stairs. “June—”

“Daddy, I forgot to put in my retainer, and I can’t find it.”

That split second of distraction is all it takes for Harold to cram himself through the door. Sam whirls on him. What the fuck? “Hey!”

“Ah, I thought you said you were alone.” Harold appraises the house. He knocks his fist against the drywall, testing the support beams. When Harold breathes, it sounds like a lawn mower throttle of snot.

Sam maneuvers himself between Harold and the stairs.

“Ah, actually, while I have you here,” Harold says, “you think I could trouble you for a glass of water? I’ve come a long way, and like I said before, no room at the inn.”

“June,” Sam says sternly, “get back in bed.”

“But Mommy says I can’t sleep without it or my teeth will move. Can you just call her, please? She’ll know where it is. It’ll only take a minute.”

Sam’s eyes never leave Harold.

Harold’s bushy eyebrows lift over his Coke-bottle glasses. “It’s no problem. I can wait.”

“Mom’s on a flight,” Sam tells June.

“Cute kid. She your only?” Harold sinks down onto the sofa and grabs a wad of tissues from the Kleenex box that Rachel keeps on the side table. He blows his nose.

Sam hesitates, calculating. “Two. I have another daughter.”

June is quiet. Harold gives her a dainty wave that sends tremors of fear and rage down Sam’s neck.

“June—bed,” he commands, and this time she obeys. He listens to her feet pound up the stairs. The door slams.

Harold cocks his head. “Why’d you lie?”

Sam grinds his teeth. He will keep his wits about him. The situation feels delicate in his calloused hands. “I don’t mean to be rude,” Sam says, reasonably. “But I didn’t invite you in.”

“I mean, yeah, sure, I know that, but you didn’t have to lie.” Harold rubs his knees. “I mean, you didn’t have to go out of your way to make up stories. You could have told me the honest truth. You didn’t have to lie with this ‘just me’ business, because you have to understand, from my perspective, how startling it might be, when I’m thinking it’s just you, and then someone comes bounding down the stairs, and I’m thinking, Intruder! Or, you know . . . I’m just big on trust. That’s just how I was raised, I guess is what I mean.” He pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

Sam considers refuting the logic of this point but thinks better of it. “You’re right. I didn’t mean to offend you. But, Harold, listen. I think this is when we should part ways. I really am sorry about the misunderstanding earlier, but that’s just how it is for tonight.”

Harold tucks the used tissue into the sofa cushion. “On a business trip, you said?”

Sam nods. “That’s what I said, yes.”

“So, is she or isn’t she? Because I know you said it, but you said you were alone, too, and, see, that wasn’t true. So I figure I ought to clarify, given our newfound footing.”

“She’s on a business trip in San Francisco,” Sam confirms.

Harold considers the news. “I hear you, I hear you. So anyway, just that glass of water, then. If it’s not too much trouble.”

Sam doesn’t move. His ears are ringing as Harold repositions himself on the couch. He tugs his pants up, and as he does, Sam sees a hilt tucked into a leather knife sheath attached to Harold’s belt. The blood stills in Sam’s veins.

“Then I’ll be on my way.” Harold shrugs. “Out of your hair.”

“How’d you say you know Rachel?”

“We go way back. I first met Rachel when she was working at, ah, Penn, I think it was.” That was two universities ago. Before New Hampshire and the unpleasantness with Rachel’s graduate assistant Ella.

Sam wills himself to keep breathing. Think. He swallows hard. “Do you want ice?”

“That’d be nice. Thank you.”

Sam disappears into the kitchen. He stands at the refrigerator’s water spigot, and as the glass fills, he quietly slides a knife from the block and tucks it into the back of his belt, flattening his shirt down over it. He returns to the other room.

“Here you go,” he says stiffly.

Harold downs it at once and, to Sam’s great relief, heads for the door of his own accord. Maybe Sam is overreacting. Harold isn’t so different from other grizzly Oregon outdoorsmen. It’s been a day, and his nerves are shot. “I’m sure I’ll catch up with Rachel one of these days,” Harold says amicably.

He’s just stepping outside—for good, Sam thinks—when a thud resounds within the house.

Harold pauses. “Ah, you see, what was that?” His eyes skirt around the room, tracing the seams of the ceiling and walls.

The fresh air is a balm to Sam’s growing distress. “Girls must be out of bed again. I better go have a talk with them.”

A wolf’s howl floats in over the breeze.

“Ah, I’ll leave you to it, then.” Harold smiles.

“Be careful out there,” Sam tells him, and then he closes the door and locks it tight before Harold can object.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .

Sam forces himself to count all the way to sixty, to ensure Harold is gone, before he ventures outside and crosses the front lawn to the cellar.

Below him, a tunnel of stairs descends. He starts slowly down the steps, unable to see beyond the small square of floor at the foot of the stairs until he’s more than three quarters of the way down.

“Rachel?” he calls. “Rachel?” Ducking to get the ceiling out of his line of sight, he hurries down the final five steps, his heart clanking in his chest. His boots land on the dusty floor, and he scans the room. Four leather shackles hang from the far wall, limp, tattered, and torn. But no Rachel. No Rachel. One high-heeled pump lies on its side. But no Rachel.

“Fuck.” Sam replays the protocol in his mind. He patted his wife down, checked her for bobby pins, for any sharp objects, and found none. He removed her cell phone. He checked the bolts on the wall for signs of rust and then cleaned them and applied WD-40 anyway. He tugged on the leather straps. No signs of wear and tear there, either. Neck, waist, ankles, wrists. He was in a hurry. They were running so late, but he secured them all, didn’t he? He double-checked.

Only he didn’t. With a sinking sense of horror, he remembers the sound of June’s voice calling him from upstairs, saying Odie ran off. And—Jesus Christ, Rachel—this was exactly his point! Why there is an order to these things, a way it must go. He tries to think clearly. Seconds are precious, and he can’t spare any to dissect what went wrong.

Sam flattens his back against the cinder-block wall. Its cold permeates the layers of his sweatshirt. Every fiber in his body is awake.

“Rachel?” he hisses. The hairs on his arms sense every subtle shift in the dank air, like antennae. Darkness soaks the corners of the basement. Labeled cardboard boxes—BABY CLOTHES, WEDDING GIFTS, HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS—feel like hiding spots in a combat zone.

He listens hard for the sound of breathing but hears only his own. The artificial Christmas tree casts a long, ominous shadow. Rachel could be crouched behind any of these odds and ends.

Sam edges sideways along the perimeter, keeping his back against the wall, feeling with his hands as he goes. His knee butts up against a workbench. He fumbles around and finds a hammer.

“Rachel, I’m not going to hurt you. Come out, honey. You can come out now.”

He grips the hammer’s shaft and creeps toward the Christmas tree. One . . . two . . .

Nothing there. Behind the boxes, nothing.

Sweat pours off him. He swipes at his forehead, the scent of his own musk heavy. “Rachel! Don’t do this! Sweetie . . .” Finally he’s convinced that she’s not there. And that can mean only one thing, which is that she is upstairs.

Sam’s eyes track up to the ceiling.

He has to find her before she can destroy his life again. Or at least this is his plan until he spots something that makes his blood run colder still: the silhouette of a lone wolf framed in the door.

Sam can still make out bits of sky, a smattering of stars, and the glow of a silver moon behind the wolf, but just barely. The wolf’s figure seals him in. He tightens his grip around the hammer, testing its weight in his hand.

“Get out of here!” he shouts. “Shoo! Get out! Scram!”

He claps and stomps and tries to make himself threatening, but the wolf doesn’t flee, doesn’t move a muscle. Two glowing amber eyes train on Sam. He’s trapped, a sitting duck for an apex predator. Panic rises in his throat, beginning to choke him like an allergic reaction. He feels his breaths bottoming out.

“Move, motherfucker!” He yells as loud as his voice will go, until it scrapes bottom and he hears the crack in it.

The wolf stands its higher ground. Slowly, Sam takes the first step up. The wolf appraises him but does nothing. Another step. The wolf bares its teeth. A third step, and the wolf’s growl reverberates through Sam’s organs.

Moonlight glints off its silver-gray fur and catches a glob of saliva, which shines for a split second before dripping from its jowls.

Another step up. “Move motherfucker, move motherfucker, you better move motherfucker,” Sam chants to himself like a prayer. He approaches closer. Up. Steady. Up again. And the wolf’s growl dies down.

That’s right, Sam thinks. You and me, nice and easy.

Pow! A head-on collision. Suddenly, a hundred pounds of wild animal slams into Sam’s body like a Mack truck. One moment his feet are underneath him, and the next, they’re not. The sharp edge of a stair clubs him between his top vertebrae. Heels over ass, he hears a sickening smack, registering only a second later that the sound came from his head hitting concrete.

Open your eyes, he wills himself. Open them! Everything is fuzzy. He feels exhausted in his bones. He hears a guttural snarl, and then he’s suffocating in fur, all over his tongue, between his teeth, up his nostrils.

Teeth snap, and Sam feels a hot gush above his eyebrow. Powerful hind legs paddle into his stomach. He rolls clear just as the wolf lunges for his throat, finding the flesh of his shoulder instead. Searing pain lights him up.

Where’s the hammer? Sam staggers to his knees just before he’s broadsided again. Splayed out, face down.

He curls into a ball and put his hands over the back of his neck to protect what he can. He whimpers as the wolf slices into his fingers and forearms. Blood bubbles from his skin, and droplets spray the concrete around him. He wills himself to get up, get up, get up. But the wolf’s battering is relentless. Sam imagines his fingers in ribbons. He imagines Rachel.

And because of this, he manages to lift his chin a fraction of an inch and spot the hammer. On knees and elbows, he crawls toward it, but the wolf is like an anchor. Sam stretches his fingers. His muscles tremble. Seismic waves pull through him. His hamstrings cramp. He screams like a warrior, and the wolf burrows its wet snout into his armpit. Hot breath, snuffing. Searching for an artery, looking for the kill.

Sam’s fingers curl around the handle of the hammer. He closes his arm around the wolf’s neck—a sleeper hold—and thrashes himself onto his back, dragging the wolf with him.

The first slam of his hammer goes into the wolf’s chest. Not hard enough, the force softened by the great armor of fur. Again. This time the wolf yelps.

Its fangs sink into Sam’s forearm. Pain burns through him. But the wolf’s head is exposed. Sam bashes it with the hammer—once, twice, three times. He doesn’t stop until the wolf goes limp, its blood and brains oozing slick across Sam’s torso.

Adrenaline pumping through him, he pushes the wolf’s head off and heads out to deal with his wife.

June’s father yanks on a cord, and a ladder drops down from the ceiling.

“Go on,” he prompts her.

“What happened to your hands?” she asks. She can’t stop staring. They look like the meat Mommy picked up at the store for taco night. Blood drips in big, fat raindrops, straight onto the wood and rug. June sneaks a glance at Odie, who stands half-asleep beside her.

June laces her fingers through her sister’s.

“Up,” her father says. “We don’t have time for that.”

June doesn’t move. Her mother always grills her with trick questions. What if a delivery man asks her to take a package? She should say no. What if a man asks for help finding his dog? She says no. What if a grown-up, or even just an almost grown-up, offers to let her watch his iPad? The answer is no. What if a friend’s dad tells her that Mommy asked him to drive her somewhere? No. Never. She screams. She bites. She runs away.

“And you have to look out for Odie,” her mother often says. “She’s still little. She doesn’t know better.”

There is blood on her father’s face and in his hair. A cut on his nose. Freckles that were never there before. One eye is puffy, like he’s been stung by a bee. Her mother never told her what to do if her father was the one trying to take her.

“Up, I said!” Her father shakes the ladder so that it rattles. June flinches.

“I’ll go first,” she tells Odie. She climbs, step by step, Odie silently following.

The attic is “Off Limits,” so June has never seen it before. Her parents have warned her about nails and mousetraps and, like always, June has obeyed.

It smells weird, and there is pink stuff that looks like cotton candy sticking out of the walls. A rocking horse. Boxes. An old tricycle. She feels like she’s landed on the moon.

“Who was that man?” she asks her father once they’re all safely ensconced in the attic.

“What man?” Odie asks. She may not have been half-asleep after all, might have just been playing possum.

“A vagrant, probably,” their father answers. “Somebody looking for a handout.”

June doesn’t know what that means.

He gets out two sleeping bags and puts them on the floor, like they’re camping. June has camped only once, and that was for Girl Scouts. Odie wasn’t allowed to come.

He plugs in a night-light, which beams stars onto the ceiling above them. June wishes on one that Mommy would come back.

“How did he know Mommy?” she asks, sitting on the sleeping bag closer to the window.

“How did who know Mommy?” Odie asks.

“Nobody,” her father says. “Here, take these.” He hands them packs of Goldfish crackers, Oreos, and juice boxes, even though it’s the middle of the night and they already brushed their teeth.

“The man,” June whispers to Odie.

Their father walks back to the hole in the floor that used to be a hole in the ceiling when they were downstairs. He stops and listens. June gives Odie a Sister Look.

“He probably doesn’t know her,” he says. “The internet, I don’t know. Everybody knows everything these days.” He and Mom have internet on their phones, but June isn’t allowed to have a phone yet. Maybe when she’s fifteen, Mom said.

“So we’re hiding from him?” June asks hopefully.

“No,” he says. “Climb inside, Odette, honey.” He holds open Odie’s sleeping bag, and she shimmies in.

“Then how come we’re up here?” asks June, compliantly sliding into her own.

“Think of it like a sleepover. Like a campout.”

“I don’t believe you.” Odie wrinkles her nose.

He starts down the ladder, leaving them. His legs disappear down the hole. Wait, this is Odie’s fault. Wait!

“Daddy!” June yells. “Where are you going? What about our sleepover?” She doesn’t care about the blood. She just doesn’t want to be locked up here.

“I have to go downstairs for a second,” he replies.

“Please, no, Daddy!” Odie whines. “It’s scary up here. I don’t like it.”

“It’s not scary. Just stay up here. Stay up here no matter what. No matter what you hear. No matter what happens. Stay here. Do you hear me? June? Okay? You understand? You’re in charge.”

June nods solemnly and takes Odie’s hand.

Together, they listen to the sound of his boots on the ladder until—whoosh—he folds it up and seals the trapdoor.

“I know,” says June, determined to put on a brave face. “It’s like we’re princesses locked in a tower.”

“What if Daddy killed Mommy?” says Odie.

June groans. “Stop, Odie.”

“What if he chopped her up into little bits?”

“I’m not listening,” June says in her singsong voice.

She hears muffled, heavy sounds downstairs, normal house-belly sounds.

“Then where did all the blood come from?” Odie asks.

Naturally, June wondered the same thing, but it gets exhausting having a little sister who is always asking how, why, what, incessantly, without a break, forever, so June ignores the question and reassures her sister. “Daddy would never do that. Daddy would never hurt anyone.”

Odie picks at her nails, but there’s hardly anything left of them. “I saw it on TV. A daddy killed his whole family. The mom, his two kids, even his dog. And he put them in a big giant trash can because he thought nobody would find out.”

June flops onto her back. “You’re trying to scare me, Odie. And it’s not working.”

“Daddy would too hurt someone, you know,” Odie whispers. “I know because he shot the wolf.” Odie’s sleeping bag rustles. “I’m going down there,” she declares.

“Odette Jane Strauss, don’t you dare.” June pushes herself up onto her elbows. She’s actually quite well suited to being a big sister. She likes being in charge; it’s just her sister isn’t easy to be in charge of, because her sister is Odie. At school, June compares notes with her friends to determine who has it worst among the bigs. June always wins.

Odie fumes. “Or else?”

June blinks. She should have thought of that.

“Or else,” she says slowly, “we won’t ever have a chance to explore all this cool stuff up here.” It’s a well-worn Big Sister trick, but she is confident that it works better on Odie than a threat.

June casually walks over to a stack of keepsake boxes and begins rummaging through it, careful not to act as though she cares whether Odie joins her. She finds a lace parasol and twirls it over her shoulder, feeling Odie’s eyes follow her. Then she comes across a frilly christening bonnet and fastens it over her bed head.

Odie giggles.

“I bet Mom kept all our old schoolwork,” says June, beginning to dig through the box in earnest.

“Even mine?” asks Odie.

Predictably, she sidles up next to June like a reluctant cat. Together they find old toys, broken ornaments, dusty books, camping gear, and even a dead cockroach.

“Scruffy!” cries Odie, pulling a chewed-up dog toy from beneath a pile of pilled sweaters. She hugs it to her chest. “Hey! Mom said Scruffy got taken by the blanket fairy.”

June smirks. “Look at these.” She holds a pale-blue onesie with an embroidered bunny up to her chest. The feet dangle just above her waist.

“Who cares?” Odie shrugs. “They’re just old baby clothes. I hate how Mommy used to dress me. Like a cake.”

June tosses the onesie back into the box and continues to dig. “Why are they all blue, do you think?”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” says Odie.

“Because we’re girls. Obviously.” June likes words with lots of syllables.

“Maybe you are,” Odie says. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“This blanket says ‘Mason.’”

Odie doesn’t like to admit it, but she’s not a very good reader. “Who’s Mason?”

“How should I know?” June reaches into the box, her arm disappearing up to the shoulder. She pulls out a thin stack of real photographs.

“Look.” June’s breath fogs the glossy print. “There are pictures.”

Odie tries to snatch the top one off the pile. “Let me see, let me see!”

“Stop!” June snaps. “I found them!”

“But I want to look, too!” Odie’s oily thumb creases the photo.

“Stop, Odie! Give me a—” June yanks at it, and her heel catches on an uneven floorboard. She feels her feet leave the floor just as her rear end finds it. “Odie!” she screams, nursing her backside. That really, really hurt.

“Sorry!” Odie screams back, tears leaping to her eyes.

The photograph has been torn in half.

“No, you’re not.” June’s whole body is grumpy.

“Sorry, June-Bug.”

“It’s fine,” June says.

The girls kneel side by side and slide the two halves together. In the image, their mother squats beside a small boy in a backpack. They stand in front of a preschool. Her arm is around the boy’s shoulder, and she’s giving him bunny ears, the way she does with Odie or June when she wants to make the other one laugh for the camera. Both the boy and the mother—their mother—are glowing with . . . love.

“What’s that kid doing with Mom?” Odie asks.

June’s eyes move between the two faces in the photo, back and forth until they blur. “He looks like her.” June lifts her half of the photograph, the half with the little boy, and holds it up to Odie’s face. “He looks like you.”

Sam hears his daughters’ footsteps overhead.

He creeps through the darkened upstairs rooms, flipping on the hall light, then the one in the bathroom. He tips the doors open, one by one. Clear, he thinks, moving through the rooms like a SWAT team member. Closet—clear. Under beds—clear. Behind shower curtain—clear.

He descends the stairs so quietly, so carefully, that he can hear the faint popping of his meniscus. Living room—clear.

“Rachel?” he whispers, relieved when there’s only silence in response.

He flips on the backyard lights and peers out the window above the kitchen sink. Where could you have gone?

Too late he notices the figure taking shape in the window’s reflection behind him. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Then why are you here?” Sam’s eyes travel the length of the counter, the butcher block out of reach, the knife he took earlier back in its place. Slowly, he turns to face Harold.

The last couple of hours since Harold’s departure haven’t been kind to Sam. His shirt is torn nearly in half. The swelling on his left eye has gotten so intense, it’s difficult to keep it open at all. The dozens of cuts on his fingers are trying to form scabs, and he has to think hard to bend and flex them.

And now, this fucking guy. Fucking Harold with his weird-ass gun pointed at Sam’s chest. A round chamber loaded with twelve silver-tipped arrows.

“Just tell me where you’re keeping Rachel,” says Harold.

Name a home invasion that has turned out well, Sam thinks. He looks Harold dead in the eye. “At a conference in San Francisco,” he says gravely. He’s always been annoyed at the leading men in action movies—how nonchalant they are in the face of death, such smart-asses—but now he thinks he gets it. They’re beat up, tired, and over it. Just like he is.

“What kind of conference?”

“She’s presenting a paper. She’s a professor. An anthropology professor.” Sam tries not to sound pissed off about Rachel’s title. He was on tenure track back in New Hampshire, which no one seems to recall. But then with the Dickerson Grant, Rachel became something of a scholarly celebrity, and he became the dull, less shiny object. All his research, his nascent conclusions, seemed derivative and boring beside glamorous Rachel. She had opportunities everywhere. How could he stand between her and a potential department head position at a major university? What kind of man would he be? He never got to find out, because then Ella happened, and once again Rachel eclipsed everything, everything except the moon, of course.

“Show me the flight confirmation.”

Sam thinks for a beat. “I don’t have it. Her graduate assistant books her travel.” Not Ella. A new graduate assistant. Ella is dead.

A faint zing passes Sam’s ear, and the window behind him explodes in a firework of glass.

Well. Sam supposes he can’t blame Harold for tiring of the bullshit.

“Did you know when you married her?” Harold wipes at his brow with a kerchief. “Did you?”

Sam did. It’s hard to remember Rachel as he must have seen her before he knew. It’s become so intertwined in their story. Like zip ties binding them together.

“I have this condition,” she told him. “It won’t go away. A guy gave it to me when I was in high school.”

“Who?” Sam asked. Just some guy she met at a stupid party. And then she told Sam, told him everything, and he said that didn’t matter, he was fine with it, it would never change the way he felt about her. And he’ll admit now that he’d actually secretly viewed it as a possible benefit. They were such bright young things back then, at the precipice of exciting academic careers, with more than enough praise and promise to go around. He was an open-minded thinker. Evolved. And she had chosen him.

He had this idea that he would stand between the world and her, protecting her from it. How naive he was not to see that it would be the other way around. She would claw her way right through him to the world.

“You’re a hunter, then.” Sam cuts to the chase. All these years, he’s never actually known if hunters were real. At the beginning of his relationship with Rachel, he was a voracious learner. He told himself that as long as he knew all there was to know about Rachel’s disorder, then they were simply taking calculated risks, the way a skydiver would. Since then, the occasional online search turns up groups of hunters, but they mainly seem to him like glorified LARPers. Truthfully, Sam wasn’t all that different, back in the early stages of their romance, back when he was really just playing pretend.

“I’m part of a group charged with stopping the spread of a deadly disease,” Harold says with comical gravitas.

Sam rolls his eyes. Of course the hunter who’s after his wife isn’t some kick-ass Van Helsing type. More like a guy who plays Dungeons & Dragons on Saturday nights. But he does have a gun.

“My wife isn’t a deadly disease.” There. An unintentional quiver of self-doubt.

Harold clears his phlegmy throat. “The average ‘Rachel’ kills four people in its lifetime. Did you know that?”

Then it seems to Sam that his Rachel is ahead of schedule. Of the kills Sam is aware of, there was “some guy I met at a stupid party,” against whom Rachel always bore an understandable grudge. That one didn’t particularly bother Sam. And maybe that’s where he was wrong. Maybe he should have come down harder after that first one. Been more morally appalled. But then there was Ella, the graduate assistant—wrong place, wrong time: she came to the house to drop off a stack of research findings unannounced. And before that, the only one that truly mattered: Mason.

One, two, three strikes.

Sam feels dizzy. The night spilling in. The glass fragments littering the countertop and floor like tiny stars.

“All you have to do is show me where she is,” Harold says. “I can handle the rest. You don’t want to watch.”

Sam takes a hesitant step forward, and Harold graciously steps to the side: After you. Sam’s trying to think, to buy time. He feels the points of the silver arrows aimed at his spine—just one could sever the cord, paralyze him, leave his girls defenseless upstairs, kill him dead—as he walks slowly to the front door and stops.

“I don’t know where she is,” Sam admits.

“Don’t mess with me, Sam. I’m afraid I’m not in the mood.”

“I’m not, Harold. She’s gone. I went to check on her after you left. She was in the basement.”

“You’re lying again.”

“Check for yourself.” Sam tries on a look that he hopes makes Harold feel sorry for him. “Please, man. She’s a mother. She’s not what you think.”

“She’s not what you think.”

There was a time when Harold would have been right on that point, but Sam knows his wife, right down to her bloody, beating heart. And he’s still here.

The truth is, sometimes June likes having a little sister. Maybe even more than sometimes. That’s her big secret. She likes Odie in a way that makes her heart hurt, but kind of a good hurt, like the way the backs of her legs ache when she touches her toes.

June and Odie pass pictures back and forth. Here’s one of the little boy wearing Mickey Mouse ears. Mommy and Daddy hold him in front of the Cinderella Castle at Disney World, a place June knows only from pictures because she hasn’t been yet.

“Mason.” Odie tries out his name. “May-son. Mason. He’s cute.” She pets his little cheek in the photo.

“Odie,” June says, sounding a bit like her usual, know-it-all self. “I think Mason is our brother.”

“We don’t have a brother.”

“But . . .” June puts her hand on Odie’s shoulder, the way their mother does when she needs to tell them something serious. “What if we did? Like before we were born?”

“But then what happened to him? Where did he go?”

June sits back and stares at the wall. “I don’t know.” She’s been wondering the same thing. But she is not prone to asking unnecessary questions. She’s practical, literal minded. When she’s given a toy, she uses it exactly as intended. Babysitter Barbie plays babysitter. Blocks are meant to build structurally sound homes. When she colors a horse, she colors it brown or black, not rainbow-hued the way Odie does. But now, June’s mind is sailing off in a dozen different directions, the winds of possibility taking her imagination right along.

“I think we should ask Mom,” Odie says.

June can’t deny that this sounds like a reasonable plan. Perhaps in such close quarters, she and Odie are rubbing off on each other.

It takes both of them to muscle the drop-down door open a few inches, enough that Odie can then use her foot to kick it down the rest of the way while June hangs on to her wrists. When June releases the ladder, it bangs open as it unfolds and smacks the floor below. They cringe together, but after a beat, they move quickly and quietly, their movements disguised by the frequent, irregular staccato of scary noises coming from downstairs. Bumps and thuds. June and Odie hold hands as they softly pad barefoot down the hall back to June’s room. There, June pulls her iPad off the nightstand and pushes a button. “Call Mom,” she commands it.

“Calling Mom,” the iPad replies.

June motions big. “Close the door,” she whispers. The iPad rings and rings and rings. Odie is halfway to the door when they hear it: Mom’s phone ringing. It feels like a miracle. That big, loud church-organ ring that nobody in the family likes, not even June, and everyone teases Rachel about.

But when they get to her room, their mother is nowhere to be found. June’s heart sinks. She feels tricked. The phone is on their parents’ bed, which isn’t even made. Rachel always warns the girls that the state of their rooms is a reflection of what the insides of their heads look like, so June always keeps hers neat and organized.

“She wouldn’t just leave it,” June says. The scary noises continue from below.

“What if he’s gone crazy?” Odie sounds squeaky. “Like the guy I saw on TV?”

“That wasn’t real,” June says, but the words feel like Elmer’s glue in her throat. A niggling of doubt. She backs away from her mother’s phone like it’s something sharp that she’s not supposed to touch.

What if Odie’s right? June is a girl who loves order, loves a world that makes sense, but she feels her own tipping upside down. She’s always been a “daddy’s girl.” She likes when grown-ups’ eyes get soft and they coo at her. Daddy’s girl. June used to say she wanted to marry her dad before she understood that little girls don’t grow up and marry their fathers. But whenever June is sick or scared or tired, she wants her mom. She wants Rachel now, too. She wants to scream “Mommy” and have her come running. And what if Mommy is sick or tired or scared and she wants June and Odie, too?

“We have to help her,” Odie whispers. “Please, June.”

June wishes she could be the little sister. She stands still as a statue and tries to listen over the clomping of her galloping heart. “The scary noises have stopped,” she says. “We should go.”

When your body is in crisis, time slows. Sam remembers hearing once that this phenomenon actually occurs because the brain takes more snapshots during a crisis, clicking like a camera, gathering information, anything that might be useful, anything to save itself.

Sam hurls his body at Harold. Click. Shoulder low, he folds Harold in half. Click, click. The two men crumple to the ground with a groan, and it doesn’t feel cool, like an action movie, it feels like two middle-aged men with bad knees playing grab ass. Click. Click. Click.

Somehow Sam registers that the gun is smashed between their two bodies. Their faces squish together, cheek to cheek. Sam tastes Harold’s pungent sweat in the pores of his nose. Click, click. Harold’s glasses go cockeyed.

Sam just needs to get one of his arms between Harold and the strange gun. He can do it. He strains so hard, it feels like he’ll have a bowel movement. Then his shoulder separates Harold from the gun, at the exact moment Harold’s teeth sink into Sam’s earlobe.

“Fuck!” Fresh blood mixes with the dried, crusty stuff already coating the unshaven scruff on Sam’s face. He grunts and throws an elbow into Harold’s Adam’s apple. A violent choking sound erupts from Harold’s throat.

And the gun is now Sam’s. Point and shoot. Point and shoot. Only he doesn’t know how to shoot this stupid, medieval thing, and Harold is coming toward him, on his knees, clutching his bruising throat, looking like the walking dead.

Harold reaches for the hilt of his sheathed knife, and Sam rears the round barrel back and smacks Harold across the nose with it. Blood drops fly, landing on the mirror, the coffee table, even the front door.

Harold is on his back, unarmed. A raw, primal scream of energy flows into Sam’s veins and—click, click, click. He sees his hands around Harold’s neck. His forearm flattens against the trachea, and he pushes so hard he feels a pop. Click. Harold claws and flops and tries to push his sausage fingers into Sam’s eyeballs, but Sam doesn’t let up. He probably couldn’t stop himself even if he tried.

It feels almost as if his soul has left his body. Like he’s hallucinating. He imagines Rachel, his wife of twelve years, watching him intently, seeing how it is, seeing what he will do, how he will make his first kill.

But when he looks up, it’s not Rachel he sees, not his ghastly wife staring down at him. He’s looking straight into the eyes of his youngest daughter. Click, click, click.

And she’s terrified.

Rachel Strauss stares through the open hole where the kitchen window used to be, into the house, watching the final moments of a man drain out onto the floor.

Her ears twitch. Nostrils flare. Her stomach feels needy, and she wants either to hump or to piss all over everything. She has a deliciously toothy mouth, and her gums smell of rancid meat. Each thought a hard consonant.

A scream lifts the hair on her neck like an electric current. And then two girls fling open the front door. The drywall craters where the knob flies into it.

Give chase or watch die? she thinks without thought. Chase, die.

Not a choice. Maybe both?

Her tongue grows wet and sloppy as the Living Man rolls off the Dead Man starfished on the floor. She smells the blood still flowing inside him, his organs soft and hot within the thick meat suit.

But not for long.

Be brave, be brave, be brave, be brave, Odie chants to herself, her cheeks jiggling as she runs. Look at me, she thinks. I am the fastest runner in the world. I am almost flying.

June’s breaths are heavy beside her. Grass swishes against Odie’s knees. Tickling her elbows. She’s got to get away from Daddy. Brave brave brave. Fast fast fast.

She grabs June’s hand and feels better with their sweaty palms mushed together.

“Odie, please, I can’t go that fast.” June tugs at Odie’s hand.

“We’ve got to, Junie.” Odie can barely do words. Her lungs feel like one of those sand holes on the beach that she and June used to dig, filling up as the tide came in. “Come on, just . . . a little bit.”

Odie is small, but she keeps pulling, and June keeps up. Ahead, the trees look like furry giants and make scary SHHHHing sounds like Mommy’s hair dryer. It’s hard for Odie to hear her own heartbeat.

“Odie.” June pulls hard, and they stop. “Not in there. We can’t go in there.”

Daddy tells them never ever to go into the forest. Which is why they have to. They must. It’s the only place they can go.

“He can’t find us in here,” Odie tells her. It’s her own turn to be big, but she needs June to come with her. If June says no, Odie won’t step into the woods alone. She’ll stay with her sister, no matter what. Even if it means they die.

June is always the careful one, the scaredy-cat, the one who warns Odie not to climb so high in the tree. But tonight, June feels her sister’s fear coursing through the creases in Odie’s palms, and she knows that love can be just as terrifying as fear.

Her father has killed a man. Her father is a murderer. And where, oh where, is her mother? Love is fear.

So when Odie insists that they enter the forest, June goes. She will follow her sister anywhere.

“Here.” Trembling, June holds out her iPad and clicks on the flashlight. Side by side, the sisters step across the tree line and are swallowed up by the breathing forest.

Cold slides across June’s exposed skin, slipping down the neck of her nightgown and lapping at her ears. The beam of light is soaked up by the darkness. June and Odie walk slowly, their shoulders bumping as they try to stay as close together as possible.

Tree trunks groan. Every ten yards or so, there is enough break in the canopy to see moonlight trickling down onto the pine needles that cushion the light tread of their bare feet.

Branches snap. Leaves rustle. June hears a swish of movement through underbrush and a bump as something heavy falls on the forest floor. And at every sound, her scalp tingles. Worry climbs the knots of her spine, and she feels her muscles go stiff. The deeper they go, the more the noises surround them.

“I think we should go back, Odie,” June whispers. “What if we get lost?” At the sound of a limb cracking, she looks back, and the familiar glow of their little farmhouse can no longer be seen.

“We can’t,” Odie insists. “He saw us.”

June looks at the screen of her iPad and sees the battery slip to red. Worry, worry, worry.

Odie’s toe catches on a root, and she stumbles forward. June keeps her from falling, but Odie whimpers.

“Are you okay?” June trains the iPad down at her sister’s foot and sees that the toe is bleeding.

“Okay.” Odie’s lip quivers, but it could be from the cold. How long can they last out here? June feels a damp, icy loneliness seeping into her bones. She thinks of hot showers. Of warm days, lying in the sun. Of hot chocolate next to a fire. She doesn’t know whether the cold will ever leave. It feels permanent.

“Should we keep going?” June asks. Odie doesn’t answer. “Odie? Did you hear me?”

A long howl winds its way through the ancient trees. Followed by another.

“Where did that come from?” June spins.

“They’re here.” Odie’s voice is hoarse with panic.

“What do you mean? What do you mean?” June feels like she might pee herself. But no sooner than she’s said the words, the slow rumble of an animal’s throat starts up in front of them. The patter of paws. “Wolves,” June squeaks.

She rotates the iPad in a circle, carving a path with the light. A glint of a yellow eye here. A flash of silver fur. The wolves move like ghosts in the dark.

“They won’t hurt us,” says Odie, but her voice is shaking hard.

“Yes, they will, Odie. They will hurt us.” And then June sees. A fallen log at the farthest point her little light can reach. In it, a hollowed-out hole just big enough for Odie. Tears prick June’s eyes. Her nostrils sting. Snot slides onto her lips. “Odie,” she says as calmly and firmly as she can. “See that log there?”

Odie makes a strangled sound. But yes, yes, she sees.

“When I say ‘go,’ you run and crawl into that log. Crawl no matter what. Okay?”

“Okay.”

June scans the area. The sound of breathing. Of her own heart beating. She says, “Go!” and drops her sister’s hand.

Odie is so fast. Much faster than June, who runs behind her sister, her back exposed. Any second she expects teeth to sink into her ankle. She waits to be dragged back by her nested hair.

Odie shimmies on her stomach and slips into the log. “Come on!” Her fingers reach for June. A snarl tears apart the air between them, and June screams as a scrawny wolf lunges at her, snapping its jaws.

She lands on her back. For a second she can’t breathe. She sees the wolf jump and shuts her eyes, even though she knows the pain won’t come from what she sees but from the fangs that will rip through her nightgown and slice into her belly.

The weight of the wolf pushes her shoulder blades into the dirt. A pine cone digs into her neck, but she opens one eye to find that the wolf’s snout has dived straight into her iPad, which she instinctively raised as a shield.

The screen cracks and splinters. Odie’s hands reach for June’s hair, digging into the roots, pulling her into the log. The wolf snaps and huffs at the iPad, confused, then—

Bang!

The wolf falls off June in a heap.

Bang! . . . Bang! . . . Bang!

Her father’s eyes are wild as he stands over June, holding a smoking gun. “Are you okay?”

She nods, unsure if it’s true.

Odie scrabbles out and cowers next to June. “Please don’t hurt us, Daddy. Please. We’ll be good, we promise.”

It’s hard to read her father’s face, caked with blood and dirt and sweat, but June sees the knob in his throat bob up and down. His eyes shine within the grime. “Why would you say that? After everything I’ve done?” His voice wavers. “You girls . . . you girls are my world.”

The sisters look to each other, not understanding.

“We have to get out of here,” her father insists. “Your mother. You don’t understand. There are things we’ve never told you.”

June’s armpits are wet. She’s afraid to go with her father, but she’s afraid to stay here. “Like about Mason?” she asks.

Her father wipes his nose. “Yeah. Like about Mason.” He nods. “Your mother’s not who you think she is. She suffers from a terrible disease.”

As Sam felt the life draining out of Harold beneath his hands, he also felt a tsunami of power crash through him. Animalistic ego. Pheromones. In that single moment—suspended like a water droplet on a foggy Oregon day—he tasted what Rachel must have known for nearly two decades.

He once asked her: What does it feel like? Do you ever feel like you’d rather die than go through it again and again? At one point, one of his chief worries was that she would decide to kill herself.

No, she told him. It made her want to live. For an animal it is that simple: survive.

As he killed Harold, Sam felt that their lives were a zero-sum game, that somehow Harold’s life force flowed directly into him. And then he looked up, disoriented, from Harold’s purpling face, and saw Odie’s staring back at him.

Sam’s heart slid down into his intestines. He could see perfectly, etched across their beautiful, innocent faces, the image of what his daughters saw when they looked at him.

Fourteen years with Rachel, and after all this time, she wasn’t the monster—he was.

Odie changes her mind. The woods and Daddy are both scary, but the forest is scarier. Daddy was right.

He doesn’t yell at Odie or remind her that he’s told her a million zillion times never ever to go into the woods. Instead, to her surprise, he seems happy to see her and June, and not just June.

“Sorry, Daddy,” Odie murmurs in his ear during her piggyback ride out of the forest. After the woods, Odie thinks that maybe June was right and it’s okay that her dad shot the wolf. But it’s probably not okay that he killed a man in their living room.

When they reach the porch and she slides down Daddy’s giant, sloping back, she feels like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. She just wants to be home. But Daddy says they can’t stay. He says they have to go now. Stick together. Go inside, get the keys to the car, and then they are leaving.

“What about Mom?” June asks.

Daddy looks scared. Odie never saw him scared, not even at the top of the biggest roller coaster at Hersheypark.

“We’re doing what I should have done for you girls years ago,” he says. “I need you to trust me. We’re leaving Mom.”

“If we have to trust you, that means you can’t lie to us.” Odie pokes him in his tummy.

“I know.”

“Are we leaving Mommy forever?” she asks.

“It’s okay, Odie.” June puts her arm around her sister’s shoulders. She gives her father an I’ve got this look, because sometimes grown-ups need that, no matter what they say. “It’s going to be okay.”

June knows a few kids in her class whose parents split up. Her heart breaks a little, but she knows that someday—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon—the adults will work out what ought to be done, and she can probably look forward to two Christmases and two birthdays, which means double the presents. June has a healthy respect for authority, and so she has every reason to expect it will all be okay.

The door whines as Sam opens it. Two fresh bullets in the shotgun chamber. Inside, the coffee table has been turned over. A picture frame has come loose from the wall and shattered on the floor. The smell of sweat and blood wafts out like bad potpourri. If he were someone else, Sam Strauss might believe that his family’s home has been robbed.

But Sam knows that the only thing stolen from his house is Harold’s body.

“But . . . where did the man go?” Odie asks. “Does this mean you didn’t kill him?” Her brain feels like scrambled eggs. Nothing makes sense. She saw Daddy kill a man, but now the man is gone, and that should seem like good news. “Daddy?”

Daddy isn’t listening. He’s too busy staring at the place where the big old dead man used to be.

“Odie.” June’s bugging her. “Odie, look.”

June points to the wall that separates the living room from the room where they eat fancy meals, like on Christmas. A long, dark shadow spills out onto the floor, but Odie can’t see anything that would make a shadow like that.

Behind the wall, the toes of a man’s boots peek out, and suddenly, Odie’s skin feels wiggly. She’s having a hard time standing still. A case of the heebie-jeebies spreads over her scalp and slides down the length of her arms. The man’s going to get them. She wants to cry, but she’s too scared for tears. She wants Daddy to kill him, kill him for real now.

“Stay here,” Daddy says.

June bunches into Odie. Daddy creeps, heel to toe, gun pointed in the direction of the man’s boots.

“Shoot him, Daddy,” Odie says.

June flattens her hand over Odie’s mouth, but Odie wishes she would have put it over her eyes instead, because with a sick thump, the man falls out from behind the wall.

The first thing Odie notices is that he’s missing his whole face. It’s just gone. Bright-red blood drips out from beneath his hair, goopy and not at all runny like water. His throat looks like he’s been attacked by a dinosaur, and there are slashes all through his shirt. Odie feels the sick swimming in her tummy, same as when she had a stomach bug last year. The whole world starts swirling.

“Odie.” June taps her. “Odie, what’s—”

It’s been ten years since Sam saw his wife, truly saw her, as the grotesque, bloodthirsty creature she really is. The werewolf of his heart. Occasionally, he still has nightmares. His beloved, intelligent, curious wife. What she is. What she’s capable of. And when he does, he often wonders whether he’s blown her physical aspect out of proportion because of the trauma of what had happened to Mason.

But now he realizes that time never inflated the reality of his wife. It dampened it. She is unrecognizable to him now, a beast that bears no resemblance to the woman he loves, the mother of his children, her face long, her breasts transformed into rippling, sinewy muscles, her arms punctuated by grappling-hook claws that could tear out his heart with one swipe. But in the eyes lingers an undeniable Rachel-ness.

She begins barking, and each gravelly woof nearly punctures Sam’s eardrums. Over six feet tall, the sharp hock of her anklebones jutting backward. Her coat is thinner and more wiry than that of a normal wolf. Pink and gray skin, pocked with aging spots and scars, pokes through the fur. She stinks of decay and sour urine.

She sizes him up, claws clack-clack-clacking on the floor.

Sam retreats without blinking, the butt of the shotgun lodged against his shoulder. Two silver slugs are nestled in the chamber. He’s never admitted to Rachel that he has them. How would he have broached the conversation, the idea that there might come a point when he’d give up on their marriage? Is that what this is? Has he known all evening that the end has come to pass?

One, two, three strikes, a quiet voice echoes in his mind. His two remaining children cower behind him. Everything in his body hurts, as though his internal organs are being torn off and dropped into the pit of his stomach, one by one. His children can be motherless, or their mother can be childless. Is that the question? He’s let the shine of Rachel blind him to the answer so far, obscure the reality of the risk, color the illusion of control.

They tried, didn’t they? They really fucking tried to make this work.

Tears slide into Sam’s beard, and he begins to sing softly: “The Luckiest” by Ben Folds, the song Rachel walked down the aisle to at their wedding. He experiences double vision now as she approaches. Here comes his bride. He can’t hesitate. He has to act. He has to be willing. Till death do us part.

Rachel bares her teeth.

Sam squeezes the trigger, and she springs toward him—now!—with a wild, terrifying fury—

“No!” Odie shrieks, and Sam realizes that the shotgun is not pointed at Rachel. It’s aimed at Odie.

June and Odie sit shivering on the porch when their mother returns, naked, from the woods, her legs shining wet with morning dew. June looks down at her own bare toes, embarrassed to see her mother without clothes on.

“Good morning,” Rachel says to the girls.

Odie’s stomach growls. She’s been asking June to make her a peanut butter sandwich, but June can’t make herself go back inside, not even for blankets or their warm wool hats.

June hugs her knees to her chest and glares at a patch of clover just off the porch. “You killed Dad,” she says, as though her mom had forgotten to pack fruit snacks in her lunch or was late for pickup at school, both of which happen with annoying regularity when she bothers to pack lunches or do pickup at all.

Rachel doesn’t say anything, and June can’t tell whether her mom already knew this or not. Afterward, Odie wanted to call an ambulance so doctors could sew their father’s throat back together, but June already knew. There would be no father-daughter dance next April. There was a choice—their mom or their father—and Odie made the decision for them both.

“Where?” Mom asks. “Inside?”

June finally looks at her. She nods and reaches for Odie’s hand. The night was long, and June’s eyes are heavy. She feels one hundred years older than her little sister.

The door clangs as Rachel enters the house, and it’s quiet for a long, long time.

“Is it my fault?” Odie asks, because a lot of things are. Odie jumped in front of their father’s gun to keep him from shooting Mom.

June was right. Daddy would never hurt them. He didn’t shoot. But that was all the time the wolf needed to bite through his neck and spit it out.

“No,” June lies. “Of course not.”

Rachel returns, wearing a pair of fresh jeans and a flannel shirt, and sits next to the girls on the porch. June clenches her teeth and tries not to show that she’s afraid. She sniffles and wipes her nose on her nightgown.

“Mom?” she asks. “Who is Mason?”

Mom looks as sad as a person can look. “Your brother.” She gently pats June’s back, then rubs it like she does as June’s falling asleep. “He died in a car accident right after you were born, June. I was driving and hit a patch of black ice. The car flipped over. Your dad always blamed me.” She takes a deep breath. “I blame myself.”

Rachel’s mouth pulls into a deep frown, and she wipes her eyes. The three of them cuddle close.

“Are you going to eat us?” Odie asks.

Rachel doesn’t laugh. “No,” she says. “I could never hurt you. It’s not in my nature.” She rubs the top of Odie’s head. “A mother animal never eats her young.”

Odie moves off the porch to look for bugs in the grass, and Rachel begins to tell June the plan, like she’s a grown-up. If their mother wants to keep them, she will have to bury the big man where no one can find him, beneath the mudslides. Then she will have to take Daddy into the woods, and call the police, and say that he was attacked by a wolf, so it’s not even a lie. Not really. And if they don’t all agree to the plan, then the police will take June and Odie away to live with strangers, and that’s okay with Mommy, too, if that’s what June thinks is best, but she should know June and Odie might not get to stay together.

June tries not to cry.

“It’s your decision,” Rachel tells her.

June walks over to Odie, loops their pinkies together, and takes Odie to walk along the gravel road and look for cool stones.

“Thank you for taking care of me, June-Bug,” Odie says.

June squints down the long, empty road, thinking of her father, and of the next time the school bus comes down this road. Who will be waiting for them? “Always, Odie,” she says.

Odie kneels and digs her fingers into the soil, looking for treasures.

June bends down to pick up a pinkish stone. “Look what I found!” She holds it up for Odie, something to cheer her up, when she sees a black nose poking out of the tall grass, inches from the top of her sister’s bent head. Yellow eyes stare out at June.

“Odie.” June swallows hard. “Odie, don’t move.”

Waves of panic ripple through June. Her legs are frozen, stuck like they’ve grown roots in the barren ground. No. Her mind screams as she watches her sister slowly, slowly stand.

Sniff-sniff. The wolf steps out of the grass, closer.

Odie reaches out her arm.

“Odie!”

The sleeve of Odie’s pajamas slides up, and June can see a spot on her sister’s wrist where their Wolf Mom tore the skin from the tiny arm. The ragged flesh of a bite. Fangs in tissue. And now a strange, black, tarry infection spiders out in thick, veiny ropes. All of the breath crystallizes in June’s lungs. Not Odie, not Odie, not Odie . . .

The wolf sticks out its tongue and gently licks Odie’s wound.

“Good girl,” Odie says.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2022 Jenna McElroy

Chandler Baker is the New York Times bestselling author of Whisper Network, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick; The Husbands, a Good Morning America Book Pick; and, most recently, Cutting Teeth.