Melanie had grossly misinterpreted Newton’s third law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, for sure. But she was mistaken when she expected her push to elicit an equally forceful push back. She had not accounted for the fact that most people prefer to shove harder. She had forgotten to pick her enemies carefully because the way those enemies fight is who you become.

“This is not good,” Mark says, telling me what I already know. He’s here to prove a point—many points, actually—and he’s started by barging into my office. Now, he’s standing there, waiting for me to say something, the weight of the world on his shoulders. When I fail to come up with anything that fits, he shakes his head. “In fact, Tom, this is very, very bad.”

Mark has a tendency to exaggerate. I have no idea at this point if he is talking about me. It could be any number of things. With him, it’s always something. “It’s not so bad,” I say. “Plus, our numbers are in great shape.”

“You have two options,” Mark informs me bluntly. “Kill her—or see to it that her past goes away.”

I take a sip of my tea. I don’t have to ask who he means by her, so I say, “I’ve never killed anyone.” I don’t say that I have no idea about my wife’s past—or that it is particularly extensive—or that taking that route would most certainly be the path of most resistance.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what to tell you.” He shoves a manila folder across my desk.

I open it.

“Jack Fielding. Gregory Hollis. Evan Burnett.”

“Do you know what these men have in common?”

“What?” It’s not a lie if it’s a question.

“They’ve all had relations with Melanie. Relations that could—that will—come back to haunt us.”

“How is that?”

“Never mind. I don’t have time to go into it. What you need to know is this.” He points to their photographs. “These are the three main players we have to be concerned about.”

My eyebrows raise. “Main players?”

I’m not sure if I want to ask about the others. He’s just asked me to kill three people. Who knows how far he’ll go with this.

“I can’t have another dead wife on my hands,” I tell him. “That would look suspicious.”

“Tom,” Mark says. “We can’t have the RWP fail.”

“What’s the RWP?”

“The Replacement Wife Project.”

“I see.”

“Melanie’s past puts it in grave jeopardy.”

Mark has a flair for paranoia. In his mind, something is always on the verge of failing. “How so?”

“It’s in the agreement, Tom. Not to mention the fact that we need this to work. If her history comes out, as shady as it is, the whole thing will crumble. No one wants to move from a sure thing to damaged goods. No one.”

He isn’t exactly lying, so I say the only thing that comes to mind. “Okay.”

Mark looks at me dead on. “I can trust that you’ll figure this out—that you won’t screw it up. Can’t I?”

“Who’s to say? I’ve never killed anyone before.”

He rolls his neck. “Don’t worry so much, Tom. Really, it’s not so hard.”

I glance down at the spreadsheet on my desk. Now doesn’t seem like a good time to bring up bad news about recruitment.

“The thing is,” he says, and I swear he’s a mind reader. “This has to work. We cannot afford for it not to. I’ve made too many promises.”

“What kind of promises?”

“You let me worry about that. Your job is numbers. Speaking of that, women coming in, women with children. Women seeking to join a church community…that’s a given. And it’s a good thing because what do we both know about women in most households?”

“They control the budget.”

“Correct. But they don’t earn the money. Which means we need buy in. We need a reason for the men to stick around.”

“I agree,” I say, hoping he’ll read between the lines. Killing three of them is counterintuitive to his goal.

“What do men want, Tom?”

I shrug. “Power.”

“Precisely.” He claps his hands. “But you know what else they want? They want to golf. They want time alone to watch sports. They want freedom to do what men do. They don’t care about parties and social standing and they especially don’t care about attending church on their day off.”

I know this better than anyone.

“We have to give them a reason to care,” he continues. “And how do we do that?”

Again, I shrug and tell him what he wants to hear. “We offer them a replacement wife?”

“Exactly,” he says. “Men are pretty basic, Tom. They only really want a few things: women, money, toys, play things. They want freedom and they want sex.”

I start to mention the former leads to the other. Cause and effect. But Mark is on a roll, so I keep my mouth shut.

“Freedom and sex, Tom. Both of which they feel are inhibited by religion. We have to offer them that.” He’s pacing my office. He stops to glare out the window, down at the city. “This is business. We have to show them that by committing to the church, they aren’t giving anything up. They have to see they’re not losing anything. They’re gaining a second shot at life. A do over, if you will.”

I don’t understand what this has to do with me killing anyone. “Why does Melanie have to die?”

“She is a liar, Tom. We cannot be associated with liars. If it gets out that her reputation is…you know…less than stellar, it’ll be the death of the project.”

“So by erasing her past, by killing people…what? This makes her record clean?”

“Not exactly. But at least there won’t be any proof.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and turns to face me. “This is why I’m hoping you’ll choose the right path here… because boy, that wife of yours? She’s a looker. People look at you differently for landing a woman like that, don’t they?”

“I haven’t noticed.”

“Respectable advertising, that’s what we need.”

“A good accountant too,” I remind him. I glare at the numbers.

“Yes, that too,” he agrees.

When I look up, Mark glances down at his watch. “I gotta run. That file there,” he points. “It has everything you need on your marks.”

“Of course.”

In two short strides he’s halfway out the door. Finally, I exhale.

Mark stops abruptly and pauses just inside the doorway. He turns and leans against the doorframe. “David will pay you a visit later, should you have any questions on specifics.”

I expected as much. Mark rarely does his own bidding.

“Oh—and Tom?”

I raise my brow.

“Please don’t force my hand on this. I’d hate to have to handle this matter myself.”

I salute him.

Mark smiles. “Been there and done that, remember?”

I nod. I remember, all right.

I’d only stepped away from the hospital to take care of a few things at the office. Work was piling up, and certain things had to be dealt with. Already, I’d been out quite a bit with June following her surgery. The infection on top of it all was unexpected. She hadn’t recovered well from the beginning, and now that she was back in the hospital, she didn’t want me to leave. June swore they were out to get her. She was never very specific about who “they” were, unfortunately, and I was too preoccupied to dig very deep. But the doctors all agreed, the infection combined with the medications was enough to cause paranoia.

“It’s okay, Tom. Just go,” Dr. Dunn advised me when he made his rounds. “I’ve given her something to make her sleep.” I looked on as he checked my wife’s chart. “I’d say you have a few hours at least.”

“I don’t know. If she wakes up—”

“She’ll never even know you left.”

“It’s good to see a familiar face among so many,” I told him. Grant Dunn was second in command at New Hope and our resident plastic surgeon. One rank above me, we weren’t exactly close friends—I don’t have many of those—but as experts in our respective fields, you could say, we regarded one another with a professional affinity. In other words, we stayed in our lanes. Which is exactly why when he told me to go, I trusted that I could.

“You don’t think she’ll wake up?” I asked again. I knew what he would say, which is at least half of the reason I asked the question. I was looking for reassurance. I hate hospitals, and I was looking for any reason possible to get out of there. I couldn’t put off things at the office any longer. That, and Melanie was blowing up my phone. She’d started to get antsy with me spending so much time with June. The truth was, I wasn’t good at juggling multiple women. It was never my intention. In reality, I got mixed up in something I was having a hard time getting out of. In reality, a one-night stand turned out to be something else and that something else was more than I’d bargained for. Really, I just wanted her to go away. But she had other plans.

“It’s good stuff we’ve given her,” Dr. Dunn assured me. “Trust me, she’ll hardly know you’re gone.”

I stood and quietly stretched. “The infection is improving, Dr. Comey says.”

“Comey?” Dunn cocked his head. “The infectious disease doctor?”

I nodded. “That’s how he introduced himself.”

Grant Dunn scratched at his jaw. “He’s not supposed to be on this case.”

I didn’t ask what he meant. All I could think about was the work back at the office that had piled up. The work that was continuing to pile up. And the mistress I needed to get off my back before she did something stupid.

He walked to the door, opened it, and motioned for me to follow. “Yes, Comey is right,” he told me as he led me out of the room. We walked down the hall. “Her numbers look good. Very good.”

Dr. Dunn walked me all the way to the end of the corridor. I was grateful when we came to the entrance of normal life, to life outside those hospital walls where time stood still. “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “I’ve got things handled here.”

That was all I needed to hear. I hadn’t even bothered to tell her goodbye. I hadn’t wanted to disturb her. Work was waiting, and I had other things on my mind.

The next time I saw my wife she was dead.