Old rules with hard consequences came back to her so easily. It didn’t matter how long ago they had been instilled, or how long since they had been enforced. She called herself stupid before that terrible voice in her memory could do it.
Why should she bother Eric with her nerves over nothing? The note wasn’t even a threat. Would she call the police over it? No. They would laugh at her, roll their eyes, mock her when they got back into their car and drove away. She knew it happened. She’d seen it happen . . . and she knew what happened after they went . . . Not here, not now, not in this life, but the memory of it was so strong she could taste the copper of blood in her mouth.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE
That was no secret.
I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE
Obviously so. She didn’t like that idea, but anyone could look up Eric’s name in the phone directory. If the mysterious “I” knew who she was, then he or she knew she was married to Eric. They weren’t living under witness protection.
Her husband was not the only Eric Burke in the Twin Cities, she remembered with the sudden hope that the note had been delivered by mistake. There was another Eric Burke! Eric’s second cousin—
But she was the only Evangeline Burke.
No one called her by that name. She didn’t use it. She never had.
She hugged herself and paced the small room, chewing on a thumbnail. She shouldn’t have looked at the mail. If she hadn’t opened the envelope, she would have been in bed asleep by now, blissfully ignorant, dreaming of her perfect day and her perfect life.
Her heart was racing. She was breathing hard. Angry with herself, she went to the front door and checked the locks again. She went to the kitchen and checked the patio slider. She went to the back door and unlocked and relocked the deadbolt.
Enough, she told herself. God, how disheartening it was to have those old thoughts and old patterns of self-loathing rise to the surface like they’d never left her—because they had never left her. No matter how she weighed them down with common sense and cognitive therapy, they could always slip loose and rise.
No. No, she wouldn’t allow it. She had worked too hard to be stronger. She had tattooed the word on her chest above her heart. STRONGER.
Nothing had happened, really, she told herself. Nothing could happen. She and Mia were safe inside their home. She was going to go upstairs to bed, and she was going to sleep. In the morning, she would take the note to work with her and show it to Grace and to Kate, just so they would know, just in case they got one, too. If this was something tied to Hope Anders, or to the article in the paper, all the directors at Chrysalis had probably gotten one just to shake them up. Kate would know what to do with it or about it. That would be that.
Hanging on tight to her false bravado, Evi turned off the television, left the lamp on, and went upstairs. She checked on her sleeping daughter, not allowing herself to go into the softly lit room. She didn’t want Mia to wake and sense her mother’s tension. Her daughter deserved better than to have her innocence tainted by her mother’s bad memories—no matter how badly Evi ached to go in and kneel down beside her bed and kiss her cheek and feel her daughter’s soft breath.
She went to her own room and pretended to be normal, brushing her teeth and washing her face. She climbed into bed with just the nightlight on and burrowed into the pillows. She pulled Eric’s pillow close and breathed in his scent, trying to calm herself. She went through the exercises she had been taught: breathe slowly, breathe deeply, in through the nose, out through the mouth.
She thought of the perfect day they’d had, and remembered those feelings of warmth and love with her family. She imagined Eric’s arms around her as they lay in this bed, skin touching skin, hearts pressed together.
But instead of drifting off to sleep to dream of how she was loved, she began to cry. She pressed her face into her husband’s pillow and sobbed, shaking with the fear that some nameless, faceless thing was about to end her dream come true.
16
Cheap Charlie’s was as much an institution for Minneapolis cops as Patrick’s bar. They had been going to the diner for breakfast for half a century. It was a mean and nasty place in an ugly brick bulldog of a building that squatted at the edge of the vast cracked blacktop wasteland known as Downtown East. For many years the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome had been the centerpiece of the area, a sports stadium that rose up from the desolate fields of parking lots like a giant, ugly concrete ottoman. For years the neighborhood had all the charm of a postapocalyptic war zone. Cheap Charlie’s had flourished.