But what if she doubted him?

“How do you know there’s someone down there? This house of yours is always making noises. I’m not going to scare the hell out of the girls just because you think you might have heard some old floorboard creaking. Either go check it out like a man or go back to sleep. I have to get up for work in three hours.”

No, there was nothing to be gained by waking her. Whatever had to be done he would do by himself. He peeled away the sheets and slowly extended one leg over the side of the bed.

What had to be done? Did anything have to be done? After all, it didn’t matter if the burglar (or burglars) got away with their TV, their stereo, their cutlery. They had insurance. He couldn’t remember what the deductible was, but it was surely much less than the potential cost of an altercation with a desperate, probably dangerous, possibly doped-up criminal.

Gently, he lowered both feet to the floor. It was freezing, of course. He should never have let Claire talk him into stripping out the old carpet. So what if it was “disgraceful” to cover up good hardwood? It was also disgraceful that in climbing out of bed in the middle of the night to protect his wife and children from an armed and volatile intruder he should have to pad about in bare feet on an ice rink. And he could hardly confront an intruder in the Kermit the Frog slippers she’d given the girls to give him two Christmases ago.

He wished that he had not heard the floorboard creak in the first place. He so easily might have slept through it. He was usually a very sound sleeper. (Like a dead baby stuffed in a hollow log, his brother had once put it.) People slept through robberies all the time.

The thought occurred to him: I am being robbed.

He tipped himself over the edge of the mattress and onto his feet. He cast a terrified glance behind him — what if she was wide awake? What if she was coldly watching him work up his nerve?

But she was sound asleep. Of course she was. With her eyelids flutteringly shut, her mouth wetly agape, her slack and unfurrowed face sunk halfway into the pillow, she looked like a glutton blissfully plunging into the first lemon meringue of a pie-eating contest.

He wished he were still asleep. He wished that he too were unconscious. He wished, for a moment, that he were dead.