Corinne was three feet from where the blade stopped. She woke to plaster and pine and daylight where the wall had been, and she is the reason I stayed calm, because a man whose wife is that close to dead learns fast that the only useful thing left is precision. I did not come outside with a gun.
I came outside in a t-shirt with my hands visible, because I have answered enough 911 calls to know exactly what Rosalind had just manufactured. She had called it in the way people do when they have already decided how the story ends, the reasonable homeowner and the armed rural lunatic. What she did not know was that the deputies who rolled in nine minutes later worked for me, and that the first thing they did was salute the man she was pointing at.
