Around this time, Annie Callahan came to work at the store, a temporary arrangement because of a huge lot of books that Bill had recently bought. She was a local girl, somewhere in her thirties, and married to an out-of-work cod fisherman. She wasn’t much to look at, Annie, one of those girls who had probably been pretty for about one year of her life, back when she was seventeen. But the years of marriage to a perpetually unemployed alcoholic had taken their toll. Her face was pinched, her hair colorless and dull. She wore a carpal tunnel brace on her left arm—“years of data entry,” she said—but even with that bad wrist, she’d been an incredibly hard worker, managing to bring a semblance of order to the store that it had never had before, at least since Jake had started working there. Jake noticed that every time Bill thanked her for her work, or looked directly at her, she’d turn bright red, all the way from the dark roots of her hair down to her scrawny neck. She was in love with Bill. That much was obvious.

Jake also noticed how gingerly she’d move around the store, especially after weekends, and Jake assumed that whatever damage her husband did to her was visible under her long sleeves and high-necked sweaters. Bill, with his Gregory Peck good looks and calming voice, was clearly her idea of a knight in shining armor. He barely noticed her, of course.

Jake reported all his findings to Alice during one of her visits to the store when Jake was all alone. He told her about the full-fledged affair in New York, plus the smitten employee. Alice’s face remained blank as she took in the information. She wanted to see the picture of Grace, so Jake found the one on Twitter and showed that to her. “What do you think?” he finally asked.

“I’m done with him,” Alice said.

“Are you going to ask for a divorce?”

Her brow furrowed, and she said, “I would never get divorced, but I’m done with him.”

That night Jake lay in bed and thought of the different ways he could kill Bill, how easy it would be to make it look like an accident, especially if he could kill Bill during one of his walks along the cliff. He even thought that if the death looked suspicious, it would be incredibly easy to suggest to the police that Lou Callahan, Annie’s violent husband, might have been involved. But mostly what Jake thought about was that he would be doing this for Alice. He didn’t think he’d be back in her life any more than he was now, but it would be one last thing he could do for her. It would give him purpose.