The world can change its mind in an instant. They can feel sorry for you one minute and hate you the next.

He killed. Him. Not me. But I called him pathetic. I called him weak. I called him out, and he responded as only he could.

“I wanted justice,” I whisper, and Hanna squeezes my hand, then swaps a look with Emily that I can’t interpret.

“What?” I ask. When they look confused, I say, “Do you think this is my fault?”

Together, too quickly, they say, “No,” and, “Of course not,” and I desperately hope they’re not lying.

I couldn’t blame them. I tried so hard to get Mom back into the headlines. I got the full three months, but am I any closer to catching him?

All I have is a mess of possible clues that are probably nothing, and if he has killed again because of me, that’s terrifying. Whatever they’re saying in the comments, they are right to point the finger at me.

I think about the family of the latest woman to die. Her name has been released now: Lorna Banks, twenty-eight, from Chiswick. She was a lawyer with a two-year-old son and a fiancé.

Those are the details that matter in a story like this. Just as my mom was a wife with a seven-year-old daughter when she died.

My phone rings, and Emily says, “Don’t answer that. Or say, ‘No comment.’”

But when I look at the caller ID, I smile and click green.

Chapter 82

“How are you, darling?” Nan asks.

“It’s not about me,” I say. “It’s happened again. Another family is broken because of that asshole.”

It’s not how I expected to reply. But I’m angry. And Nan understands that anger in a way that Emily and Hanna never will.

“Maybe I should stop. I don’t want anyone else getting hurt.”

I wanted justice for thirteen families, not heartbreak for another.

“He would have killed again, Jessica. You’re not to blame.” Nan’s voice is quiet down the phone, and I hate myself for doing this to her.

I feel sick, my head and my heart pounding, the image of Lorna Banks’s smiling face replacing Bernie’s body in my mind. It’s on the front page of every newspaper, at the beginning of every television report: a photo taken at a better time, one she never imagined would be the one she was remembered for.

Mom’s newspaper photo was taken on her wedding day. Her eyes are sparkling, watching something or someone unseen, her smile wide, her veil caught on the wind.

That is the image printed in the newspaper reports still haunting me. Nan chose it, and I wonder who chose Lorna’s. I wonder if her fiancé will be as broken as Dad is or if one day, he’ll move on. I wonder what her two-year-old will become.