Chapter 9 — THE KEY

On Friday morning, before work, I moved the key.

Lucas had been playing with it. He is ten and it is a shiny thing on a hook at ten-year-old shoulder height, and twice that week I had found it on the kitchen table.

So at six fifty in the morning on the second Friday in November I took the key off the cup hook in the pantry and put it on top of the refrigerator, pushed back from the edge, behind the cereal.

I did not tell anyone.

Not because I was hiding it. Because it was a key, on a fridge, and I was late.

Sarah put Sophia out on the patio at approximately three twenty in the afternoon. We know that from the neighbour's doorbell camera at the Brennans', which caught eleven seconds of the side yard.

Sarah went to let her back in at approximately three forty.

She went to the pantry. The hook was empty.

She looked in the kitchen drawers. She looked in my toolbox in the garage. She looked in the pockets of the coat I had worn the day before, which was hanging in the hall.

She did not look on top of the refrigerator, because there was no reason on earth for anybody to look on top of the refrigerator.

Two hours and eleven minutes.

Twenty minutes of that is Sarah's. I have never once tried to give her that twenty minutes back.

The other hour and fifty-one minutes belong to me.