Before I could do anything else, Kate Cobb's knocking rattled the door. She didn't barge in the way she usually did. Instead, she spoke through the door, a thin note of anticipation threading through her voice.

"Maisie Acevedo, I thought I heard something fall in there."

"What are you two doing?"

I let the panic flood into my voice.

"Mom."

"Something's wrong. That toy you got for Lily had a short circuit!"

"Dick's been electrocuted. He's unconscious. I checked, and I think his heart's stopped. I already called an ambulance."

"I need to start CPR right now. Go to the garage. There's a new AED in my car. Bring it up. We have to keep him alive until help gets here."

"Cardiac arrest only gives you a few minutes. Any longer and it's too late."

Silence.

Then Kate Cobb nearly laughed out loud.

She didn't hesitate for a single second. She turned the new lock she'd had installed and bolted the entire suite from the outside.

"Maisie, it's not that I don't understand what's urgent and what isn't."

"But I heard more than just a person hitting the floor. I also heard the late-night snack I prepared for you two go crashing down. That room must be an absolute disaster right now."

"So clean it up first."

"Otherwise, what will people think?"

I almost laughed.

A man in cardiac arrest, every second ticking down between life and death, and the condition for unlocking the door was a freshly mopped floor. No clean room, no way out. No paramedics in.

But I wasn't surprised. And I wasn't in any rush.

Because this wasn't the first time I'd lived through it.

Dick and I had brought Lily back to his hometown to visit Kate. When we arrived, we discovered she'd renovated the mansion we'd built for her yet again.

She'd knocked three second-floor bedrooms into one sprawling suite, converting it into a two-bedroom apartment with its own living area. Ugly security bars had been bolted over the windows, completely out of place on a house like that.

The suite's door had two new handles that didn't match anything else. In my previous life, I'd noticed them and thought nothing of it. It wasn't until after what happened to Lily that I understood: they were there so the door could be locked from the outside.

So.

All of it was deliberate.

She'd insisted she didn't want to live with us in the city, that she had to go back to her countryside mansion.