Chapter 2
The pantry had a door.
That was the whole of Imogen's plan. It was not a plan.
She went down the back stairs faster than she had come up them, and she went through the kitchen without touching anything, and she got into the butler's pantry and pulled the door shut behind her and stood with her back against the shelves in the dark.
The door had no lock. It had a brass thumb latch that had been painted over some time before she was born.
She put her hand on it and held it.
The alarm cut out at 2:09.
She would learn later that this was the system doing what it was built to do — thirty seconds of tone, then silence, so the people in the safe room could hear.
Nobody had ever explained that to her. At the time she thought the men had found the panel, and she stood in the dark with her hand on a painted latch and waited to find out what happened next.
What happened next was nothing.
For a long time. That was the part nobody tells you about.
There were two men in her house and they were not hurrying.
They went through the front rooms the way you go through a house you have decided is empty — drawers, doors, the long scrape of something heavy being pushed across the floor of the library.
One of them whistled a little. Not a tune.
The sound a man makes when he is working.
Imogen stood still and counted, and lost count, and started again, and gave that up too.
Her phone was in her left hand.
She had not thought about it once since the kitchen.
She looked down and there it was, and the screen came up when she moved her thumb, and the light of it in that dark was so bright she nearly dropped it.
She got it against her stomach, face-in, and stood there with her heart going and the shelves digging into her shoulder blades and waited to hear whether anybody had seen a glow under a door.
Nobody had.
She turned the brightness all the way down. Then she opened the house app.
Astrid Sable had made them both install it four years ago and Imogen had used it maybe eleven times, always for the gate. She found the camera list. She found SAFE ROOM — INTERIOR.
It loaded gray, then resolved.
No sound. That was the first thing. Astrid had been very clear about that, back when Imogen wasn't listening: cameras in this house didn't record audio, because audio was a lawsuit. So it was a silent picture, wide-angle, from a corner up near the ceiling, in flat white light.
Her husband was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall.
Fiona was sitting on the bench across from him. The gray robe. Bare feet drawn up. She had her arms around her knees and she was looking at him and he was looking at the floor between his shoes.
Imogen watched them for four hours.
She sent the message at 2:13.
Im in the pantry. Theres two of them. Downstairs.
She did not capitalize anything and she did not fix the apostrophes and she watched the little word under it, and the little word said Sending, and then it said Not Delivered, and then there was a red circle.
She tapped it. It tried again.
She would try eleven more times over four hours and seven minutes, and every single time she would watch the red circle come back, and every single time some animal part of her would be certain that this time it would go, because eighteen inches of steel and a concrete shell is a box that radio does not leave, and nobody had ever explained that to her either.
At 2:31 a man came into the kitchen.
She heard him on the tile. She heard him open the refrigerator, and stand there, and shut it. She heard a drawer. She heard him say something to the other one, out in the hall, too far off to make out.
Then the pantry door moved against her hand.
It was not a shove. It was a hand, testing. The latch went down a quarter inch under her thumb and came back up, and the door pressed maybe an eighth of an inch inward against her palm, and stopped.
Imogen did not breathe.
On the other side of three-quarters of an inch of painted pine a man decided the door was stuck, or decided it was a closet, or decided nothing at all, and let go, and walked away.
She stood there with her hand on the latch and her whole body shaking in long slow waves and found that she had the phone up in front of her face again, and that she was looking at her husband, who was still sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, and who had not moved.
This is what four hours looks like with no sound.
At 2:40 Cormac got up and went to the monitor. The safe room had one, mounted at eye height on the left-hand wall, cycling the house cameras. He stood in front of it with one hand braced on the wall and watched it cycle and did not move for a long time.
At 2:52 he turned around and said something to Fiona. His mouth moved for about six seconds. Fiona shook her head. He said something else, shorter. She shook her head again, and then she said something back that took longer, and he turned and put his forehead against the wall beside the monitor.
At 3:10 he went to the door.
He stood in front of it. He put both hands flat on it. He stayed like that for maybe two minutes, which is an extremely long time to watch a man stand at a door on a phone screen in the dark, and then he hit it once with the side of his fist and went and sat down on the floor again.
Imogen understood, somewhere in there, that he knew.
She had not thought that before. She had spent the first hour with a version of the night in her head where he believed she was in Providence, or believed she had gotten out the kitchen door, or believed something — where there was a story he was telling himself that made the closed door survivable.
But he was standing at the monitor with his hand braced on the wall watching the cameras cycle, and the cameras cycled through the kitchen, and the kitchen was empty, and every eleven seconds it came around again and was still empty.
He knew where she wasn't. That was the same as knowing.
At 3:34 Fiona got up off the bench and crossed to him and put her hand on his back.
Between the shoulder blades. Low. She left it there.
He did not move away.
Imogen watched that on a four-inch screen in a pantry in the dark with two men in her house, and what she felt was not what she expected to feel.
It was not rage. Rage would have been clean.
What she felt was a kind of terrible embarrassment, the hot kind, the kind you get when you have been wrong in public — because she had spent four years being reasonable about this, and being generous about this, and telling herself the exact true thing, which was that nobody was touching anybody.
And now somebody was touching somebody. And it meant nothing. And that was so much worse than if it had meant something.
At 3:51 one of them came back into the kitchen and tried the pantry door again.
Harder this time. The latch went all the way down and the door came in against her palm a full inch before she got her shoulder into it, and for about two seconds Imogen and a man she never saw pushed against each other through three-quarters of an inch of painted pine.
Then he stopped. He said something — one word, bored — and went away.
At 4:02 the men left.
She did not know it at the time. She heard a door and then nothing, and nothing went on being nothing for so long that she stopped believing in it. She stayed where she was.
At 4:50 she sat down on the pantry floor, because her legs would not hold anymore, and she kept one hand up on the latch.
At 5:30 the sky started coming gray in the gap under the door.
At 6:11 the police came through the front of the house calling out, and Imogen heard a man say ma'am three feet away and could not make her hand let go of the latch to open the door, and a state trooper her own age ended up opening it from the other side and finding a woman sitting on the floor of a butler's pantry with a phone in her lap.
At 6:14 the seal released.
Six bolts, out of sequence this time, ugly. Then the arm.
Imogen was in the front hall by then, wrapped in a foil blanket she did not remember accepting, with her back — she noticed this and it made her want to scream — against a wall.
Cormac came out onto the landing.
He saw her over the rail. She watched it land on him — the relief first, total, and she hated it; then the arithmetic behind his eyes, happening in real time; then the thing after the arithmetic, the one she didn't have a name for, that took his face apart.
He came down the stairs. Not fast. That was the strange part. He came down the stairs like a man going to identify a body.
"Imogen."
His phone went off in his hand.
It was loud in that hall — the ordinary text tone, the same one he'd had since before they met, absurd and cheerful — and he looked down at it because a person looks down, and Imogen watched him read a message that had been sent four hours and one minute ago.
Im in the pantry. Theres two of them. Downstairs.
He made a sound.
She had never heard him make a sound like that and she never heard him make one again.
It came out of him sideways. He put one hand on the newel post and went down onto the second stair like his legs had been taken out from under him, and he sat there in his undershirt with his phone in his hand and broke completely, in front of a state trooper and two EMTs and his wife.
And Imogen stood against the wall in a foil blanket and felt, before she could stop it, the reflex of eight years: go to him.
She did not go to him. But she had to decide not to. That was the thing she would remember.
They did not talk until nine.
The house filled up and emptied again. Troopers, then a detective, then a man from the alarm company who would not look at anybody.
Astrid Sable arrived at 7:20 without being called, went into the safe room, came out four minutes later, and stood in the hall with her jaw set and said nothing to anyone, and Imogen noticed that and filed it and did not ask.
Fiona came down at some point in a coat over the gray robe and said, "Imogen, I —"
"Don't," Imogen said.
That was all. It came out level. Fiona stopped, and nodded once, and went and sat in the morning room with the broken window, which Imogen thought was either the most tactful thing she had ever seen a person do or the least, and she was too tired to work out which.
At nine the last car went down the drive and it was just the two of them in a kitchen with glass in it.
Cormac said, "I thought you were in the room."
"I know."
"Fiona said—"
"I know. I heard her."
He stopped.
"You heard her," he said.
"I was on the landing. I said your name."
He put both hands on the island and leaned on them and looked at the granite, and Imogen watched a forty-seven-year-old man try to find somewhere in his own kitchen to put his eyes.
"The door shuts at ninety seconds," he said. "It just — that's how it's built. Ninety seconds and it goes. I was turning around. I heard something and I was turning around and it was already —"
"I know how the door works."
"Imogen."
"Astrid walked us through it. I was standing in the hall with a coffee." She heard her own voice doing the thing it did, the level thing, the thing that had gotten her through two hundred dinners. "Ninety seconds from trip to seal. That's the standard. That's what everybody specs."
"Yes."
"So you had ninety seconds," she said, "and I was in the house."
"I didn't know you were in the house."
"You didn't check."
He did not answer that.
That was the moment. She would understand it later, much later, from the far side of a great deal of damage: that he did not answer, and that she let him not answer, and that both of those were choices.
"Ask me what I did for four hours," she said.
He looked up.
"Ask me."
"Imogen—"
"No, ask me. Because in a week you're going to want to know and I won't be able to say it then. So ask me now."
He said, very quietly, "What did you do for four hours."
"I stood in the pantry with my hand on a latch that doesn't lock," Imogen said, "and one of them tried it, and I watched you on my phone."
The kitchen was extremely quiet.
"There's a camera in the room," she said. "There's no sound. So I got to watch it like a movie. You sat on the floor. You went to the monitor at twenty of three. You hit the door once at ten past. And at half three she put her hand on your back and you left it there."
"Imogen. Nothing has ever—"
"I know nothing ever happened." She was surprised at how loud that came out and then she was not surprised, because it was the first true loud thing she had said in eight years. "I know. I've always known. That isn't the part."
"Then what's the part," he said.
And she thought: if you have to ask.
"The part," she said, "is that you asked her where I was."
She did not leave the house.
She thought about it. Siobhan would be up; Siobhan was always up by six and the restaurant was eight minutes down the road, and there was a bed over the kitchen that had been hers on and off since they were nineteen.
Her mother's house was forty minutes north and the room would be made up because the room was always made up.
She stood in the front hall at half past nine with her phone in her hand and both of those doors open and did not take either of them.
She went up the back stairs instead.
The guest wing smelled like somebody else's shampoo.
Fiona's things were on the dresser in a row — three of them, lined up straight, of course they were — and Imogen swept them off into the wastebasket with the side of her arm and stripped the bed down to the ticking and threw the whole armload out into the hall.
Then she sat down on the bare mattress in the room where the other woman had been sleeping for six weeks, in the house she had spent four hours in, and she did not cry, and she did not call anybody.
At some point she heard him come up the back stairs and stop outside.
He did not knock. He stood out there long enough that she could hear him decide not to, twice.
When he finally went, she got up and shut the door herself, and stood with her hand flat on it for a while, and then she checked — before she sat back down, without meaning to, without even noticing she was doing it — that it opened.