It was dusk outside, and the interior of the condo was dark. Her phone had a light on it, and she used that to look around. She went straight up the stairs and into the bedroom, so unchanged since she’d last been in there that she could almost feel time falling away. She turned off her phone’s light and let her eyes adjust. The bed was made, loosely pulled together, and she ran her hand along the chenille bedspread. She remembered that her mother used to sleep in this room before she did, and then was suddenly alarmed to realize that she was nearly the same age as her mother was when she died. She shook the thought of her mother out of her head, and reminded herself of the reason she was here. Jake had taken pictures of her, many years ago, back when she hadn’t known any better, and she wanted to make sure they weren’t around for just anyone to find. When she’d lived here, he kept the photographs in a copy of James Michener’s Hawaii that was always on his bedside table. She should have taken them back then, but she had decided to leave that small memento to Jake. But now he was on the national news, and so was she. She needed to get those pictures back.

It took a while, but she found them in one of the hardcover books stacked on Jake’s dresser. She quickly riffled through them, marveling at the beauty of her young body. She stared into her own eyes in the photographs, wondering what that different person had been thinking. She put the pictures in her purse.

Walking back to her car, she noticed that there was a station wagon with a boat trailer next to her Volvo that hadn’t been there before. The vehicle gave her a bad but familiar feeling, as though she should have known whose car it was. But the feeling passed, and then she was annoyed by how far the trailer jutted out, and how hard it would be for her to navigate her own car out of the lot. Rounding the boat on its trailer, she could see two people still in the car, and decided she would ask them to move out of her way. But as she got closer, the light in the station wagon went on, the driver’s side door opened, and a familiar man got out.

“Alice,” Mr. Bergeron said, and stepped toward her, hand extended.

Then Alice heard a sound like a fuse being lit and her entire body stiffened. She felt herself trying to speak but no words came out, and she fell, the side of her head smacking the pavement. Her whole body hurt. Then her face was covered with a damp, sweet-smelling cloth, and the world went dark.