The winding sandy path is hemmed in by a rickety post-andrail fence, which is itself hemmed in by black shrubs with yellow flowers.

Gulls cackle and complain overhead, where black garlands of clouds look like distant bands of blackbirds.

The tides rush in, rush out, an outlying murmur.

Miriam steps over the yellow police tape that's meant to block people from going in, and she steps past the sign announcing "Under Construction" and another sign explaining that soon the lighthouse will be home to a new lantern and state-of-the-art polycarbonate windows.

It feels like she's on a rollercoaster ride – cresting the hill, though no hill awaits. Her stomach is home to squirming eels. It expands and contracts. Sinks and swims.

Her feet fall on sand that shifts beneath them. She sucks in a breath and kicks off her shoes. A sense of the inevitable precedes her, running ahead like an eager dog. She feels like she's a little girl forced to approach a mother who waits with a leather belt in hand.

She walks.

It feels like she's not approaching the lighthouse, but that it's approaching her.

You can't change anything. Her own voice, not Louis's, chiding her in her head. Just remember that. You're not here to change anything. You're just here to bear witness. It's what you do. It's what you are. You're the war crow on the battlefield. The chooser of the slain.

She reaches the end of the hedges. The sand path continues toward the lighthouse. The lighthouse has a white base, a brick red top.

Frankie mills about outside. He's a tall drink of motor oil on the bright beach, a dark shape on an illuminated X-Ray, a long dark shadow in sympathy with the sky above. He paces. Rubs his nose. Itches his ear.

Hairless, the man Harriet called Ingersoll, is nowhere to be seen.

It's almost time. Miriam doesn't have to look at the cell phone to know it.

But she pulls out the phone anyway. Gun in one hand, phone in the other, and diary tucked in her pants, she thumbs the redial button on the phone.

Then she starts walking.

Frankie's phone rings. It should. She's calling it.

He answers, and she hears him in stereo – his voice on the phone and his voice ahead: "Harriet?"

Miriam wings the phone at his head like a fucking boomerang. It whips hard across the bridge of his not-insignificant nose, and he staggers, blinking back tears.

She thinks to shoot him, but – No. Ingersoll will hear the shot. Don't do it.

Instead, she hurries up and drives the barrel of the gun deep into Frankie's solar plexus.

"The solar plexus is a massive bundle of nerves," Miriam hisses.

Frankie fumbles for his gun, but Miriam's knee to his wrist knocks it from his hand.

As he wheezes, his face turning red, she chops him in the neck with the butt of the pistol.

"Mastoid process triggers your gag reflex."

True to her information, he doubles over, gagging. He doesn't dry heave; he vomits what looks like a half-digested hoagie.