Alan woke clean and dry, amazingly and magnificently sore, deliriously happy, to the sounds of the storm outside and his cell phone going off next to his right ear. He swore at anyone who would call him at this time of all times. And what time was it?

Five a.m.

They’d slept that long?

Well, they’d had a lot of exercise.

He fumbled the cell phone off the nightstand with his left hand and said, “Yeah,” and even though he was irritated with the caller, he still answered with half a stupid grin on his face because Phoebe was right there next to him and he felt like the luckiest man on the planet.

“Disaster plan activated,” Morrie said. Alan could hear Morrie’s voice shaking, something he’d never heard before. “Get in here now. Loaded charter bus hit a tractor trailer on I-95, and cars dominoed into the wreck. Every ER in the county is going to get buried in just a couple minutes.”

And Morrie hung up before Alan could even protest that he had a hand that was swollen to twice its normal size. Then Alan realized that a banged-up hand really didn’t matter under such circumstances. They were going to need him anyway.

The call left him as awake as any bucket of ice would have.

“Phoebe,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “Sweetheart. I have to get into the ER now. You need to go back to your place. I don’t want you to stay here if the FBI thinks you’re over there. I don’t want anything bad to happen. Okay?”

She rolled over and looked up at him, and he hoped what he thought he saw in her eyes was real. Because it looked like the future to him.

And then her expression changed and she whispered, “Don’t go. Please. I’m... cold inside, Alan.”

He pulled her close, realizing that she was cold on the outside, too. “Phoebe, there was a bad wreck on 95; I’m going to be tied up there all day — it’s going to be hell. I can’t stay.”

She nodded, staring into his eyes, and he felt her fear, felt the cold. Icy, horrible cold that burrowed out from the center of him, slowed his blood, made his arms and legs heavy, made him weak. He shouldn’t go. Shouldn’t.

But the hospital was dealing with a disaster, and the storm would have the choppers grounded, which meant every hospital would be keeping the major trauma cases that landed on it. And this was his job. His duty. People would live or die today because of him — because he was there or because he wasn’t. He couldn’t not be there. He watched Phoebe while he pulled on a spare set of clean scrubs he kept for such situations and shrugged into his lab coat. Tried to flex the fingers of his right hand, and then knew that whatever else he would be doing, he wasn’t going to be sewing anyone up.

And he almost called in and tried to beg off, because he didn’t want to leave Phoebe. Because something was wrong.

But he had to.

Chilled and scared, frozen from the inside out, he said, “Get dressed. Hurry, sweetheart. I’ve got to walk you home, and then I have to go in to work.”

Phoebe just nodded.

While she pulled on clothes, Alan called the number Agent Toeller had given him. Toeller answered.

“Phoebe got scared last night and spent the night with me.”

“She... WHAT! How?” Toeller sounded furious, but in a calm, cold way.

“I don’t have time to explain. We have an emergency at the hospital, and I have to get in there. I just called to let you know what was going on before I walked her over to her place.”

“Don’t Hang. Up,” Toeller said. In the background Alan could hear Toeller snarling. Because Alan couldn’t hear the responses, he guessed the men who had been assigned to watch over Phoebe were catching hell. Toeller was snarling at them to speak up, to stop mumbling, to explain to him just how the woman they had been assigned to protect had spent the night somewhere else.

Phoebe had on underwear and a shirt and was fighting her way into her jeans when Toeller came back on the phone. “They’ll both have questions for her when she gets there. I expect her to stay put and answer them. They had a slow night, but this sort of thing could have compromised this operation. It can’t happen again.”

“I’ll tell her,” Alan said, and Toeller said, “No. I’ll tell her. Let me talk to her.”

Phoebe got the jeans zipped, and Alan said, “Toeller,” and handed her the phone.

She was quiet for a moment, her face pale and her eyes huge. “I know that an operation of this sort is expensive, sir. I realize that... I’m sorry. It seemed the best thing to do at the time.” She closed her eyes wearily, and Alan hugged her. “It won’t happen again, sir.”

She handed the phone back to Alan without a word and slipped her shoes on, skipping any socks. She yanked her hair back into a quick, loose ponytail without even bothering to brush it first. She looked impossibly sexy, and Alan hated having to leave her even for a minute.

“I’m ready, I guess,” she said. But her brown eyes were enormous, and he could see the fear in them.

And he couldn’t stay. “I promise we’re going to get through this,” he told her. “You and me. We’re going to win this and come out the other side of it stronger and better.“

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

She nodded then. “All right. I’ll hold you to that promise.” She tried a brave smile, but it wasn’t convincing. He hugged her, she grabbed her backpack, and he walked her next door, waited while she let herself in, listened while she locked the door behind her, and then trudged through the dark, clinging to the puddles cast by the streetlights, all the way around the building to the other side. He’d parked in a guest space to give his own space to the FBI. One lucky agent had spent the night concealed in the back of a car just like Alan’s, waiting to grab Schaeffer on the off chance that he decided to use his own parking space.

Phoebe would be fine, Alan told himself. And he would get back to her as soon as he could.

She would be fine.

He got into his car and the cold inside him just got colder.

* * *

Phoebe stood with her nose pressed to the peephole of her door, watching Alan until he disappeared from view. Then she sagged against the door, cheek pressed to the cool metal. The end of everything slithered toward her. Alan was gone, and the darkness was coming to claim her. Death was so close she could feel its breath on her cheek.

And then Phoebe stood up straight, realizing slowly that something was wrong. The lights were off downstairs — the place was completely dark inside.

And not quite silent — she could hear radio chatter in little bursts from upstairs. But something about that chatter felt wrong.

And something smelled horrible. Like iron and...

Inside her backpack, a phone started ringing. She jumped from the noise, but also from the impossibility of it

She didn’t have a cell phone.

But it was ringing.

She fumbled with her backpack, lifting the front pocket, reaching for the Browning.

That was where she found the cell phone. Her handgun was gone.

Her belly started cramping, and a wordless dread seized her.

When had the phone appeared? When had the gun gone? She’d last seen it before she went to Alan’s. Before she took the cold-water shower and sneaked out the sliding glass door.

Which meant that while she was in the shower, Michael had found a way to swap them.

Phoebe pulled out the phone. It had a lighted face, and she could see the button highlighted with the word TALK just above it on the screen.

She pushed the button indicated, wanting more than anything to throw the phone away.

But she had to know. She had to know what had happened to her gun. How it had vanished. And what Michael wanted. Because this had to be Michael.

“What?” she said, and was dismayed to hear the shaking in her voice.

Over the phone, she heard a horrifying scream, and then Michael’s voice. “I have Alan,” he said. “And if you want him to live through this, you’re going to do exactly what I say. If you understand, say ‘yes.’ ”

Inside her, something whispered and slithered and rattled. Coming closer. Death. She could feel Death’s gaze, could feel the chill of his breath. He was staring at her, and staring at Alan.

She’d thought Alan would be at the hospital, that he would be safe. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Very good. I can see you. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You’re going to turn on the lights in your front room, and you are not going to make a sound, because if you do, Alan is going to have very bad things happen to him very quickly. Understand?”

“I understand,” she said. She reached to her right, felt the switches that turned on the lights.

And in the flash of first light, she saw red and red and more red. Jammed her fist into her mouth to keep from screaming, from saying anything. Froze, so that she did not flee the townhouse, because she did not doubt for a moment that Michael had Alan, or that he would do exactly what he said he would do. More of what he had already done.

On the side wall of her townhouse Michael had nailed two hands, cut off just above the wrists. In blood over the hands, he’d scrawled, “Guess Ben will keep his hands off you now.”

The blood he’d scrawled it with, though, wasn’t Ben’s blood. Because the FBI agents who’d gone upstairs to keep an eye on things were downstairs. Dead in chairs. Bound, gagged. Sheet-white, with big needles jammed into their arms and necks, and tubes running from those needles into Phoebe’s big metal salad bowls. And in the salad bowls, deep pools of darkening red. And paintbrushes.

Michael had spent a lot of time with her white walls.

WHORE and SLUT and BITCH and CUNT repeated endlessly, and in between, YOU’LL DIE, YOU’LL DIE, YOU’LL DIE, YOU’LL DIE.

Blood on the carpet, blood on the stairs, blood on the table, blood on the furniture. He’d taken his time. How had he given himself so much time? How had he caught the FBI agents off guard? Why didn’t Toeller across the green know something was wrong?

Phoebe heard the radio crackle upstairs again. Heard Michael’s voice in two places — in her ear and upstairs. “She’s in. She’s fine. Reed is talking to her now about this stunt. Over.”

The sound of the radio died away. Phoebe stood there, considering what she was hearing. Michael had killed the agents. Somehow. And then he had to have set up some sort of relay so that he could check in with the FBI, pretending to be those agents. Toeller had no suspicion yet that his people were dead. Wouldn’t until shift change, which was still hours away.

He couldn’t actually be upstairs. Because he had Alan, and he couldn’t have Alan and be upstairs. By the time anyone knew to look for Alan — or her — they would be dead.

In her ear, Michael said, “Go into your bedroom now.”

Knees shaking, Phoebe walked in, and in her bedroom found pictures of her nailed to the wall. Above the photos, Michael had painted the words, ONCE UPON A TIME, PHOEBE SCHAEFFER WAS A BAD GIRL. He’d taken pictures of her when she was sleeping. No. Not sleeping, she realized, creeping closer, looking at them. He’d taken them after he’d drugged her. He had posed her. Obscenely. Over and over and over, while he took pictures of her. She could see Michael’s hands on her, doing things to her. Sometimes he had knives with which he was pantomiming cutting her and maiming her. In most of the pictures, he had worse things than knives. He’d created a photo story — a story of torture and bondage and rape and more torture and eventual murder — and pinned the story on her wall.

Beneath the pictures, he’d painted, AND THEN ALL HER DREAMS CAME TRUE. THE END.

In some of the pictures she could see her eyes half opened, could see that she was trying to make sense of what was happening. In some of the pictures she was in bed, in others she was on the couch. She realized the photos of her on the couch in her bathrobe had been the “nightmare” she’d remembered in enough detail to recount to Alan when he’d heard her screaming and run to her rescue.

Phoebe leaned on the foot of her bed, too sick to stand under her own strength. All the nightmares had been real. Everything had been real.

But they had been just the beginning.

And then all of her dreams came true. The END.

“You like my story?” he asked.

And she dropped the phone and vomited all over her bed.

From the floor, she could hear Michael saying, “Pick up the phone, Phoebe.”

Her stomach heaved, she retched, the smell of blood and urine and shit were everywhere, two dead men and parts of another waited back in the main room, stenches and more stenches filled the air, and Death had pinned her future to the wall in Polaroids. She wanted to fall apart. To die right there, quickly — get it over with before the future that Michael had documented for her with such sadistic patience came true.

But, “Pick up the phone right now,” Michael said again, and then Alan screamed.

Phoebe, still retching, collapsed to the floor and clutched the phone. “Here,” she said.

“You like my story?”

“No.”

“Wrong answer,” he said, and this time Alan screamed for a long time — a hellish, high-pitched wordless scream. “I haven’t started cutting anything off of him yet, but don’t give me any more wrong answers. You understand.”

“Yes.”

“You like my story?”

“Yes,” Phoebe said through clenched jaws, while her stomach heaved, empty.

“Good. You remember I warned you — more than once — that if you ever left me, you would come back to me.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to come back to me now, Phoebe. All by yourself, and all alone. Because you love me, Phoebe. Don’t you?”

All she could think of was Alan, in Michael’s hands. Michael, who had knives, and tools far worse than knives. Alan, from whom Michael had not cut off anything. Yet.

“Yes,” Phoebe said, with tears starting from her eyes.

”That was a little slow, darling. I’m not going to make him pay for your slowness this time. But you want to answer quickly and enthusiastically next time. And every time thereafter. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said instantly.

“Good girl.” Michael took a deep breath. “The FBI doesn’t know their boys in these are dead yet. You are not going to give any signs. Open your closet door.”

Phoebe crawled to her feet, grabbed her backpack, and walked to the closet, dreading having to find whatever Michael had left in there. The rest of Ben Margolies? Or someone else? Or something else?

But the closet was... the closet. She stood looking into it. She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“I’m... I’m looking,” she said.

“Yeah. You’ve all been looking.” Michael laughed.

The image of the Three of Discs flashed through her mind. The hole in their defenses was in there? The thing they had all been overlooking — it was in the closet?

But the closet was on the back wall of the townhouse. It was nowhere near the townhouse Michael had rented. The side wall the closet shared was with Alan’s townhouse. Its back wall was the shared wall with the townhouse that mirrored hers on the opposite side of the building. She couldn’t see any advantage in bugging the closet. She couldn’t imagine what other use he might have made of it or how it could constitute a massive security breach.

Phoebe stood, frozen, trying to find anything that might be that giant hole the Three of Discs had warned her about.

“Come on, Phoebe. Figure it out. Because I don’t have a lot of patience, but I do have your fuck-buddy here, and if you take too long, I have a lot of interesting ways that I can relieve my boredom.”

“You could tell me.”

“But then I couldn’t use your stupidity as an excuse to hurt him,” Michael said in a tone that sounded completely reasonable. Phoebe hated that tone.

She started shoving things around, looking, but not knowing what she was looking for. Something that could be hidden in a closet. But everything in the closet was hers. The few boxes. The clothes hanging up. The clothes folded on the left shelf. There wasn’t anything else in there — just the closet itself, which was a rectangular walk-in box with a bare lightbulb overhead, the two side shelves, the bare wall to the back—

Stop.

No.

Michael wouldn’t have rented two townhouses.

The FBI had only found out about one. They were watching only the one beside hers. If Michael had access to the townhouse behind hers as well, she didn’t think they were set up to monitor anything he did. The back half of her building had its own parking lot. Its own sidewalks and dumpster. Its own cozy green. The FBI was set up to watch her green. Her side of the building.

They were looking in the wrong place.

She moved towards the back wall, trembling.

“Took a lot of work to get that passage right,” Michael said, as she reached out and pushed on the wall. It swung inward at her touch. “Helped a lot that you don’t use the closet much. Most of my first month I spent building the passageway when you were out. You don’t go out nearly often enough, by the way. I spent hours making it sound as solid as the rest of the structure, making sure that its bracing wouldn’t give way when I wasn’t using it. Doing finish work on the edges. Getting the paint right. Cleaning up traces of sawdust and concrete block dust on your floor. But I think most of that was unnecessary effort. Every single one of you looked at my door while you were in there, and not a single one of you thought to push on it. Well, I did have it barred and braced when I wasn’t using it, so that wouldn’t have done anything anyway. But it’s the thought that counts, don’t you think?”

The hole in their defensive wall had been a literal hole in her wall. Michael had given himself a door straight into her bedroom.

He had never needed to deal with her locks. Her bars. Her defenses. She’d been defending everything except the path he’d created for himself, and the only effect of everything she’d done had been to keep help from reaching her.

He hadn’t needed to worry about being observed when he went from parking lot to front door, because no one was watching his front door. They were all watching the false lookout post. The one they had probably only found when he was ready to have them find it.

Meanwhile, Michael had been able to go from her bedroom to her kitchen, unseen, while she read tarot cards a few feet away, her back to him, because she was facing her front door. Guarding that damned front door.

He had been able to drug her. Had been able to just walk in and watch her while she slept. Could have done anything to her at any time — but instead he’d just taken pictures. Because the most important part of this whole fantasy of his, she realized, was that she come back to him on her own. She had to be terrified, because that was what did it for him — her fear. But she had to be the one to go to him, because that was what he’d said she would do.

And Michael always had to be right.

And the hell of it was, she was going to do exactly what he wanted her to do. She was going to walk right into his hands, because Michael had Alan, and she could not abandon Alan to him.

Phoebe stared at that open hole and into the darkness beyond, terrified to take the next step. Michael was over there. Alan was over there.

“Come on through, Phoebe... and close the door behind you. We have a lot to accomplish yet.”

She shivered. Stepped through the doorway into his closet, which was empty. Dark.

She did not close the door all the way. She hoped he wouldn’t notice. If he did, he didn’t say anything.

“Keep going,” he told her.

She opened the door, stepped into a place no one had seen yet but her. The bedroom that mirrored hers. Into Death’s antechamber. Michael had turned the room into a gallery of drawings. Charcoal, pencil, marker. Drawings of her that covered every inch of every wall, every inch of the ceiling except for the place where the light fixture poked through. He’d drawn right on the walls in places, favoring red and black marker. And in places he’d pinned big sheets of paper to the walls.

Michael wasn’t much of an artist. And his artwork only had one theme: Phoebe’s pain, humiliation, submission. In the first glance, before she averted her eyes, she saw herself in ropes, in chains, with hooks through her skin, dismembered—

“You’re supposed to look, Phoebe. I did all this for you. Look at the drawings; tell me how much you like them.”

Michael was watching her. She couldn’t see him yet, but he saw her. And he had Alan. So Phoebe looked. Walked along the walls, stared up at the ceiling. Tried to turn her face toward all of the hideous pictures without actually seeing any of them. They were pictures of the inside of Michael’s mind, every single one of them. They terrified her.

So she remembered Alan, focused on Alan. Remembered what she had to say to keep Alan safe and in one piece. “I like them.”

“Good girl. So do I. You’ve looked long enough. Go into the bathroom.”

Phoebe was trying hard to keep her breathing slow enough that she didn’t pass out. She couldn’t pass out — that would leave Alan with no one to help him. Her heart raced, her hands shook so badly she needed two tries to turn the knob.

Michael wasn’t in the bathroom.

“Undress,” Michael said.

Phoebe almost balked. But... Alan...

She put the backpack down. Undressed.

“Brush your teeth.”

She found a new toothbrush and toothpaste on the sink. She did as she was told.

“Get the scissors out of the medicine cabinet.”

She took them out.

“Cut your hair off.”

“What?”

“Cut your hair off. Don’t leave more than about an inch all over.”

She started cutting, and the sink quickly filled with curling black strands as long as her arm. It took her a while — she could only think of lambs being sheared, and that made her hands shake worse.

But at last she finished.

“Into the shower. I want you clean and smelling nice when we renew our vows — none of his touch on you, no whiff of your puke. You understand.”

“Yes.”

She showered, and he directed her to dry off and leave her clothes on the floor. She picked up her backpack, and he directed her into the kitchen, and from there into the dining room. Michael wasn’t there, either, and neither was Alan. But another man was. A doctor. He lay on the floor against one wall, blindfolded, his mouth taped over with duct tape, his arms and legs bound. He had on scrubs and a white lab coat with Dr. Beacham-Smith embroidered over the left breast pocket. Phoebe could see his chest rising and falling. Blood in his hair, drying on his forehead.

“Don’t touch Morrie. He did me a favor, albeit only at gunpoint — so he gets to live.”

Morrie. Alan’s friend.

Oh, God. Michael’s path to her had been wide and bloody.

“Walk over to my table,” Michael said, and Phoebe, who had been staring at Morrie, willing him to wake up or do something to show her he would be all right, jumped.

On Michael’s table, which was a cheap card table set up under the dining room chandelier, she found clothes. White leather panties. A leather bra. A huge round white pillow thing with elastic straps on it that she couldn’t figure out until she suddenly realized that it was the sort of maternity padding models who weren’t pregnant would use to model maternity wear. A blonde wig. A white dress. White ballerina flats.

“We’re going to renew our vows today,” Michael said in her ear. “For better or for worse, until death do us part. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

“Yes,” Phoebe said, staring at the clothes on the table.

“Put your wedding clothes on. And the pregnancy padding. And the wig.”

Phoebe started dressing. She kept the phone resting on her left shoulder, holding it in place with her ear, while she put on the bra and the panties. With her hair gone, her head felt too light. Her balance was off.

“I’m making a home movie of our ceremony, sweetheart. I filmed the wedding guests over in your place last night. Had nice mood lighting for them. And today, I’m getting great pictures of the bride dressing. You know, white actually films very badly. But your outfit is going to be white for such a short time, I think I’ll be able to tolerate the glare while it is. It’s the anticipation of color that makes white so exciting, you know?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You want to sound happy and loving when you say that, sweetheart. Because the adulterer I have here is going to be our witness for the first part of the ceremony. And we want to have enough of him left to sign all the papers.” Michael chuckled.

Phoebe put the cell phone down, struggled into the maternity padding, slipped into the dress and the flats, pulled on the wig, straightened everything. The shakes had given way to a horrible heaviness — to fear so bad she almost couldn’t get her arms and her legs to move.

Alan, she kept thinking. Alan. Do this for Alan. Maybe, maybe, you’ll have a chance to save him. Do everything you can to give yourself that chance.

She picked up the phone. “All right.”

“You look...” Michael laughed — a happy, open laugh. “You look like a white cow, actually. Oh, God. The camera adds a lot more than ten pounds.” His laughter died away. “This next part is going to be risky for you and your friend. Don’t make any mistakes. Walk to the end table beside the front door.”

Phoebe passed a bank of monitors, herself on some of them, empty rooms on others, the inside of an empty car on one. One screen, though, riveted her. On it, she saw Michael wearing a microphone headset, dragging a struggling, tape-bound Alan through an odd oval door, shoving him to the floor of a very small room also filled with monitors, and then looking at the monitors.

Until that moment, some part of her had held out hope that Michael didn’t really have Alan. That maybe the screams were taped. Or that he was hurting some stranger.

“And here we both are,” Michael said, seeing her looking at him. “Let me get settled.” He took a seat in a swivel chair bolted to the floor, turned around so that he was looking straight at her, and rested one cowboy-booted foot lightly on Alan’s crotch. “See your doctor?”

Phoebe saw Alan. He lay on the floor, bruised and bloodied, still in his scrubs and lab coat, glaring at Michael. He wore metal halo headgear that pulled his tongue out and clamped it, stretched, beyond the line of his lips. Phoebe remembered that headgear from her marriage. And then, while she watched, helpless to intervene, Michael took two alligator-clip wires and connected them from a small black box on the floor to the clamp. Phoebe remembered that box, too. Her breathing got faster, and the room started getting light around the edges. Started fading.

No. She had to breathe slower. Had to stay in control. She had to be able to help Alan.

Then Michael flipped the switch and Alan screamed and writhed and Phoebe’s whole body went rigid — Alan’s pain colliding with her memories.

“Isn’t that fun?” Michael asked, flipping the switch off.

“Don’t hurt him!” Phoebe screamed.

Michael flipped the switch again and over Alan’s wordless screams shouted, “Wrong answer, whore.”

Phoebe couldn’t think of the right answer. Alan was screaming, and his pain was her fault, all her fault, and all she could think to shout was, “Yes, Michael. Yes!”

“Yes, Michael,” Michael repeated, flipping the switch off again. “I like the sound of that. Wait until you see what we’re going to do to him once you get here.”

Breathe slower. Stay in control. Don’t be weak. Don’t be helpless.

Phoebe had to find a way to save Alan. Somehow.

“To the table, Phoebe. Time’s a-wasting. Chop-chop.” She limped to the table, her knee suddenly throbbing. She saw a tiny white beaded handbag, a key ring with two keys on it — a car key and a house key — what looked like a hearing aid, and a little plug of some sort.

“You’re looking at the wireless earphone/mike for your cell phone. And with it, the connector. The connector plugs into the base of the phone, the earphone/mike slips into your ear. You’ll wear the wig with the hair down so that, just in case one of those sharp-eyed Eagle Scouts has wandered to the other side of the building, he doesn’t notice something amiss. Put the earphone on, and then plug in the connector.”

Phoebe did as she was told.

“Put the cell phone into the handbag. Pick up the keys. And... Phoebe, leave your backpack right there. You already know your gun isn’t in it, right? I have that here with me.”

She’d known the Browning was gone — had known it the second she realized the cell phone was ringing from inside the bag’s holster pocket. But for the last two years that backpack had never been farther away than arm’s reach. When she let it slide to the floor, she realized how very completely she was in Michael’s power.

She was helpless.

At every turn, he’d taken her control away from her.

And he seemed to be reading her thoughts, for he said, “I don’t have any intention of having you turn the tables on me this time, dear. I spent nearly three months in a coma last time, thanks to you, and an incredible amount of time and pain recuperating and rehabilitating afterward. So this time I’ve made very sure that everything will go just the way I want it to. I’ve spared no expense.”

Phoebe held the keys in her right hand. Swung the little beaded bag over her shoulder.

“Pull the plug on the monitors, Phoebe,” he said. “It’s right next to the door. Take the power strip with you when you leave. You’re going to toss it into the dumpster on your way past.”

She did as she was told.

“All right. Out the door, remembering that you don’t want anyone to notice you. At all.” In her ear, Alan screamed briefly. “Because this can get so much worse. Walk to space four-fifteen. The car sitting there is a light brown sedan. You’re going to get into it. And you’re going to come home.”

Phoebe took the next step of her descent into Michael’s hell, into the hopeless darkness.

She told herself that she had to hang on for Alan. Had to keep looking for a crack in Michael’s armor. Had to keep fighting until she had nothing left to fight with, because Alan had no one but her to keep Michael from him.

But hope was gone. Dead.

A blanket of black clouds and the drizzle that was the last passing of Helene brought forth the bleak day. But for Phoebe, all that remained was darkness.