Page 43 of Wrong Mail

"Or he was close to them and knew that detail," Rodriguez says, and then he stops there, before I can push it any further.

"So you think they randomly picked our house?" David says.

"That's what we hope to find out when the man in ICU wakes. If he does. Right now, we don't have enough to say. But what we do know is they were determined. They walked straight up this long road in the worst weather we've had all year." He spreads his hands. "They skipped the Shaw place, which is bigger. They didn't bother with the empty Erickson house. Instead they came right here. To the house with no cameras. The house with a woman alone inside, her husband gone, on the one night the storm took the power down. Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe they cased three streets and picked the softest door. That happens." A pause. "But it's a lot of maybes."

The throb in my shoulder goes all the way up into my jaw.

“Do you think it's connected?” I ask.

"I don't have a single thing that says it is." He picks up the tablet. "That bothers me too."

David stands. His hand finds the small of my back, and I've started to notice how often that hand arrives when I'm the one asking the questions.

"Thank you, Detective," David says. "Thank you both."

Rodriguez takes his time gathering himself. At the door he stops with his hand on the frame and turns back.

"We'll find out why these men targeted your home. In the meantime, get that security system in."

We watch them go. The county SUV backs down the drive and the marked car follows it. Once again the road is just the road, green and quiet. Frank Werner is standing at his gate pretending to look at his hedge.

David shuts the door and leans his forehead against it for a second, and when he turns around he's my husband again, the one from before all this, tired and frightened and reaching for me.

"Come here," he says.

I let him fold me in against his chest, careful of my arm. I put my face in his shirt and breathe him in.

For a moment, it's enough. Almost enough.

The size of him around me. The ordinary thud of his heart.

Over his shoulder, through the kitchen window, the aviary is loud and the pool lies blue and untouched. Past the fence, the Erickson house sits empty behind its cedars. Twelve hours ago, a man I barely know fought off two intruders, and now one is lying in a hospital bed.

He might wake up.

I want him to wake up.

I want it so badly it frightens me.

Chapter Fifteen

By four o'clock there are three men on ladders bolting cameras to my house. I'm lying by a pool I won't get into, watching a HomeShield Security van fill my driveway. I have never felt safer or liked it less.

It was my idea to use Henry's company. David spent the morning on the phone, trying two different security companies. The soonest either could send a crew was Thursday. He stood in the kitchen saying today, it has to be today, and getting nowhere.

So after he got off the phone, I reminded him that Henry had a security service. He was a quarter mile up the road and did exactly this.

David said no.

He said it more than once, and he meant it. In his mind, Henry was a neighbor. A new resident. We didn't know him, even if he had pulled an intruder off me. Letting him onto the property to install cameras and alarms sat wrong with David in a way he couldn't quite explain and wouldn't let go.

Regardless, I picked up my phone and called Henry.

David watched me do it.

I refused to spend another night in an unprotected house.

He didn't stop me. He looked at my arm in its strap, then at the clock crawling toward dark, and knew nothing else could be here today.