The perspective opens up here for the first time. Wexler, an office, a document review, a detail that means nothing to the sheriff who wrote it.

Run it cold and administrative against the domestic warmth of Ray and Casey trying to be in a house together — the two registers cutting against each other is most of the tension, and the reader gets the dread well before either of the Kellers does.

Meanwhile the aftermath at home: Casey detoxing badly, Ray being a father at it with a patience that is itself a little unnerving, and the two of them not discussing the tow yard at all. She circles it. He deflects with an ease she starts to find frightening.

Somewhere in here the reveal lands properly for the reader — the passport, or the second name, or a box that has been in the crawlspace for eighteen years — and the first quarter of the book reads differently in retrospect. Every flat, dull, domestic detail was tradecraft.

Ray understands what's coming before there is any evidence of it. He starts making arrangements, and Casey, who has just decided her father might be worth something, watches him prepare to leave.