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"Just leave me alone," I snap. "For God's sake, get out."

She stops dead and gives me the same look she’d give me when I was nine years old and tracked mud through her clean kitchen. "Don't you dare speak to me like that, young man," she says. "I raised you better than this. I have been picking up after you since you were in diapers, and I will not be shouted at like I'm the help."

You do not win against this woman. I have tried for thirty-eight years and I have never once won. "You are the help, Dolores," I say. "That's literally your job." She narrows her eyes, and I hold my hands up. "I'm joking. I'm sorry. You're not the help, you're the general. Please. Just—make me another one, would you?"

She arches a brow.

“Please.”

She sniffs, satisfied, and bends down to gather the papers I threw, because she can't help herself. She mutters the whole time about my blood pressure and my father's temper and how I'll give myself a stroke. I smile at her while inside I am absolutely losing my mind, because my wife walked into a building on camera and walked out of existence and I cannot find her now. My Manon is gone and there is nothing in this world I can do about it.

The hours go by. I now start calling people who are not my people.

I call Marchetti, who has wanted a piece of my business for six years, and ask him, very calmly, very reasonably, whether he happens to have my wife.

There's a long pause on the line.

"Your what?" he asks. "Have I got your what?"

And I realize how it sounds, a man calling his rival to ask if he's misplaced his wife somewhere on his premises. I hang up, then call two more. I ask the Koviches.

I ask a guy who runs most of New Jersey, whom I haven't spoken to in four years, and he laughs at me for a full ten seconds before that call ends as well. By tonight it'll be all over the city that Laszlo Novak lost his wife four days after the wedding, yet I dial the next number anyway, and the next, until I've gone through every man in the city who I deem a rival or enemy. None of them take me seriously, and that’s no surprise.

Then there's no one left to call. At least, dialing gave my hands something to do. Now it's hours later and the waiting is unbearable. My elbows are on the desk, my face in my hands, and I keep dragging my palms down it like I can wipe this whole day off. My chest feels like an anvil dropped dead center on it. I’m about to combust.

I keep seeing horrible shit. Her in the trunk of someone else's car. Some man with his hand around her wrist, her scrubs, that face she made at me this morning turned on someone who won't find it adorable. I've dressed men who died gentler deaths than the ones I'm inventing for her. Charles’ death was nothing compared to what I’ll do to whoever laid so much as their pinky finger on her.

And then the laptop lights up on its own.

The screen goes bright, and for one insane moment I think it's a virus, some pop-up. Then the picture settles and I stop breathing.

It's a room I don't know. Dark, with a red light coming from somewhere at the bottom. Manon is in the middle of it, in a chair, her head down and her hair over her face, her wrists together in her lap. She isn't moving. Behind her, back where the light doesn't reach, two men stand in the dark, watching her.

I'm on my feet before I decide to stand. Every filthy thing I imagined today is on the screen in front of me, and all I can do is watch it happen through a screen I can't reach through, in a room I can't place. My hand is already on the phone to put every man I own on the road.

Then Manon lifts her head and looks straight into the lens, and our eyes meet. She's calm. There's no mark on her, no torn clothes, no blood, nothing that says anyone forced her into that chair.

The two men behind her step back and walk out of the frame. They move like they work for her. Nobody was holding her. She sat down in that chair and gave me ten seconds of the exact nightmare I'd been building all day, because she knew how long it would take to break me.

She wanted me to feel it. The trunk. A stranger's hand on her wrist. She put the whole thing in my head and then took it away, so I'd know she can make me believe anything she wants and leave me grateful when she tells me it wasn't real.

Then the red room is gone, and the screen changes to a place I know.

My basement. The steel table, the trays, the fridges along the back wall. Black and white, from the corner camera above the door. A timestamp in the bottom corner.

03:12 a.m.

Nine hours ago. While I was asleep upstairs.

The door opens and Manon walks in.

She takes her time. Her eyes go over the steel tables, the drain in the floor, the cold that gets into most people before they've said a word, and none of it touches her face. She stands in the doorway of my mortuary like she owns it. And I am not even surprised.

She must have gotten the code or she had it the whole time.

I think back through every evening, every time I went down with her somewhere behind me in the hall, and I can’t even recall that moment. I never noticed her looking when I was getting inside. I’ve watched her for so long, but she also was paying attention.

She goes to the tray first. Picks up a scalpel, considers it, sets it down two inches to the left. Then she picks up the next one, turns it so the edge faces the wrong way. She does the whole tray like that, slowly, one instrument at a time, and it's worse than if she'd swept them onto the floor, because she obviously thought about this process long and hard.