“His cousin, Jenny, her dog was . . . tortured. Which I guess was bad enough to kill it.” Behind her eyes flash images from the folder. Her breath catches in her chest like on a blustery winter day, even though the air is warm and sticky. “So she hired me to do this. And I thought maybe you might could help.”

“Me.”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re still not looking into Chris’s murder.”

“Well, no. I . . . I don’t know. This pays. I need money, our house—”

“So it’s all about money. Is that why you helped Chris the first time? Because he paid?”

She sucks air between her teeth. “Now, c’mon. Don’t be that way. It’s not like that. This girl . . . this dog . . .”

“They killed Chris and you don’t want to do anything about it.”

“Don’t you dare say that. I did something already, and it was the wrong thing.” Her nostrils flare. She feels her pulse in her wrist, her neck, the backs of her legs. “Now I’m doing something different. Maybe trying to help someone instead of hurt ’em.”

“You don’t even care that he’s dead.”

Pow. A hand—her hand, a hand she seems to barely control—slaps Shane hard across the cheek with a stinging smack. He recoils, touching the struck cheek with the gingerness one might use to touch a wounded bird. Eyes wide, he looks around like this is some kind of joke, like a camera crew might pop out and reveal this to be a YouTube prank. The panic on his face kills her. Because she made that panic happen. She gave it life.

“Shane—”

He fumbles with his bike, almost trips over it. She says his name again, reaching out and putting her hand on his tire to help him—but he pulls the bike away.

“I’ll handle this on my own,” he says. Way his voice shakes, she thinks he might cry.

“Please, Shane, I’m sorry as hell that I did that . . .”

But he’s gone. His pudgy legs spinning, the bike bumping as it jumps off the sidewalk. She hears him for a little while even after she can’t see him, spokes whispering, bike chains like bee wings.

She kicks the curb with her foot. Pain shoots up through her calf.

“Shit!” she hisses. “Shit.”

Now: past midnight. Atlanta—alone and feeling it—hides behind a well-manicured boxwood shrub ringing a tennis-and-basketball court. Her legs are cramped and her back feels like it’s on fire, but she makes no effort to move, in part because she’s afraid that once she does she won’t want to hunker back down again, and in part because she thinks she just plain deserves the pain.