The Do Not Disturb door hanger placed on the handle.

I can feel the blood creeping up my neck, making my ears ring. My pulse loud enough that Zoe, sound asleep, can certainly hear. My heartbeat is so erratic it makes me dizzy, and I drop my head again beneath my legs to catch my breath, thinking evil thoughts toward my husband and that woman, thoughts of planes bound for Denver bursting into flames and crashing to the ground.

“It’s time for Ruby’s medicine,” I hear then, the timid voice of that girl, that kleptomaniac who has stolen my father’s wedding band from me.

I want to scream, and yet, instead, with astounding control, I say, “You took my father’s wedding ring. You took the ring,” and I want to grab her by the neck and shake the living daylights out of her because she took the one thing in the world that meant the most to me.

But I remain on the edge of the bathtub, running my hand along the fleece robe, along the straight edge of the Swiss Army knife tucked safely inside, considering its many tools, or weapons if you may: a corkscrew, scissors, a gimlet, and of course, a blade.

“What?” she asks feebly, hurt, as if she’s the one who’s been laid to waste. Pillaged. Plundered. Her voice is light, barely audible, as she shakes her head desperately, frantically, and whispers, “No.”

But her eyes don’t look at mine, and she’s begun to fidget with her hands. She blinks rapidly, her fair skin turning red. Telltale signs of deceit. I rise to my feet and, as I do, she retreats backward, quickly, and out of the room, prattling in an undertone something or other about Jesus and forgiveness and mercy.

A confession.

“Where is it?” I ask, following her into the living room, my footsteps delicate but fast, a half step faster than her own, so that I quickly narrow the gap. I drift across the room in my sheepskin slippers and turn her by the arm so that she’s forced to look at me, forced to maintain eye contact as only the best perjurer can. She steps away quickly; I’ve intruded upon her space. She sets her arms behind herself so I cannot touch them again.

“Where is my father’s wedding band?” I demand this time, aware of the way the baby watches us from the floor, gnawing on a polka dot sock she’s pulled from a foot, her pale pink piggies hovering midair, completely insouciant to the tension surrounding her, filling the room, making it hard to breathe.

“I don’t have it,” Willow lies, her voice as spineless as an earthworm or a leech. “I promise, ma’am, I don’t have the ring,” she says, but her eyes remain shifty, scheming, and in place of an impressionable, naive young woman, as I had once perceived her to be, I see someone, instead, who’s wily and astute. Artful and sly.

She evades my stare, twitches uncomfortably in her own skin as if it’s suddenly the skin of a porcupine, riddled with quills.

An act.

Her words come out staccato-like, abrupt and clipped, an outpouring of denials: I didn’t do it, and I swear, her hands overgesticulating, her face turning red.

A charade.

She mocks me with her lies and her tomfoolery, with the naive eyes that are anything but naive. She knew exactly what she was doing, from that very first day I spotted her at the Fullerton Station, waiting in the rain.

Waiting for someone like me to take the bait.

“What did you do with it?” I ask frantically. “What did you do with the ring?”

“I don’t have it,” she says again, “I don’t have the ring,” shaking her head briskly from side to side, the bob of a pendulum.

But I insist, “You do. You took it. From the bathroom hook. You took my father’s ring.”

“Ma’am,” she pleads, and it’s pathetic almost, the tone of her voice, heartbreaking, really, if it wasn’t such a sham. She retreats a step and I follow, quickly, the abruptness of the movement, of my movement, a single step but no more, making her flinch, a wince escaping from somewhere deep within.

My hand gropes for the Swiss Army knife in the pocket of the purple robe, clutching tightly as I utter the simple word, “Go.”

I feel it tremble in my hand, that knife. And I think to myself, Don’t make me...

She’s shaking her head, swiftly from side to side, the sepia hair falling into her bulging eyes, her lips parting to mouth a single word: No. And then she’s begging me to let her stay, begging me not to make her go. Outside it’s begun to rain, again, raindrops tap, tap, tapping at the bay window, though it’s a drizzle and not quite a storm, not yet at least.

Though there’s no telling what the night will bring.

“Go,” I say again. “Go now. Before I call the police,” and I take a step for the phone sitting on the kitchen countertop.

“Please, don’t,” she begs, and then, “Please don’t make me go,” and she’s staring out the window, at the rain.

“You took the ring,” I insist. “Give me the ring.”

“Please, ma’am,” she says, and then, “Heidi,” as if trying to reach me on a more personal level, and yet it strikes me as inappropriate, presumptuous even. The audacity of it reminds me of her impudence, her overconfidence; the rest is just a pretense, a work of fiction. A pathetic display used to slink into my home and steal from me. I wonder what else she took: the Polish pottery, my grandmother’s pearls, Chris’s class ring.

“Mrs. Wood,” I state.

“I don’t have the ring, Mrs. Wood. I swear to you. I don’t have the ring.”

“Then you sold it,” I maintain. “Where did you sell it, Willow? The pawnshop?”

There’s one in Lincoln Park, I picture it clear as day, a storefront on Clark with the sign: We Buy Gold. I think of myself, that afternoon, lying down for a brief nap. Did she pawn the ring while I was asleep? But no, I hung the chain on the hook tonight, before I kissed Zoe good-night and dimmed the lights, cleaned the kitchen and settled down with my laptop to work. Or not work. To pretend to work.

Or maybe that was last night, I think, feeling suddenly lost and confused, not knowing which day it is, or which way is up.

But knowing with certainty that she took the ring.

“How much did you get for it?” I ask then, all of a sudden, and when she doesn’t respond, I ask it again, “How much did you get for my father’s wedding ring?” wondering—five hundred, a thousand?—all the while stroking the smooth edge of the Swiss Army knife with my hand, running my thumb along the blade until it most certainly bleeds. I don’t feel it, the blood, but I visualize it, a drop, maybe two, that seeps onto the purple robe.

And then she’s gathering her things from around the home—baby bottles and formula; she’s collecting the torn jeans and leather lace-up boots, the army-green coat, the vintage suitcase from the office down the hall—and dragging them to the front door, where she drops them in a heap, turning to me sullenly, the phony despair replaced with a stoic expression in her eyes.

But when she moves to lift the baby from the floor, I intercede.

Over my dead body, is what I’m thinking, but what I say is, “You can’t take care of her. You know that as well as I do. She would have died from that infection if it wasn’t for me.”

An untreated urinary tract infection could lead to sepsis.

Without treatment, a person could die.

But those weren’t my words; those came from the doctor at the clinic, didn’t they? It was the doctor who told us that, wanting to know how long this had been going on, the baby’s persistent irritability and that untamed fever.

“A week, maybe two,” Willow had said regretfully, but I’d mocked her candor and said, “Just a few days, dear, not a week,” knowing what the doctor would think of us if we had let the infection go on for weeks, had allowed the fever to carry on that long. I’d rolled my eyes at the doctor then, there in the tawdry office and said of Willow, “She has such a poor sense of time. Teenagers, you know? One day, one week, it makes no difference to them,” and the doctor, perhaps the mother of a teen or a preteen herself, had nodded her head and agreed.