“What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever had to deliver?”

He hardly blinks. “I don’t open the mail, ma’am. That’s a federal crime.”

“You must have some idea, though,” I persist. “Bloody hearts gift-wrapped for exes, exploding glitter bombs, anything like that?”

He glances at the beer in my hand.

“Forget it,” I say. “Dumb question.”

“Nah. I’m just thinking. Trying to remember,” he says. “Every Christmas some of the kids send letters to the North Pole. I get letters to the tooth fairy, too.”

I wish I hadn’t asked. Loneliness turns from an ache to a hard punch. I think of all those rose-cheeked children, all those families at their dining room tables making wish lists: snowglobes of normalcy.

The mailman lifts his cap to palm some sweat off his hairline. “I once knew a widower kept sending his wife letters,” he adds. “A few months after the funeral the letters started coming. He’d leave one for me every day. No address, just a name and Rome, Italy. He’d convinced himself that she’d run off with somebody else. He told me she always wanted to go to Rome.” He shakes his head, plays with the buttons on his uniform with stained fingers. “He wrote her every day until he died, begging her to come back. Funny, isn’t it? He’d rather she had an affair. He wanted her alive, even if it meant she’d done him wrong.” He shakes his head.

“Funny,” I echo.

He nods and turns back to his truck.

I stand there for a while, looking out over nothing, leaving sweat prints on my father’s mail, thinking about that old man sending letters to his dead wife, thinking about Misha and Frank Mitchell, everyone insisting Kaycee had run away. Maybe Condor was right—maybe it wasn’t so much a lie as it was wishful thinking. Maybe they just wanted to believe she’d escaped.

Wanted to believe they’d let her.

My father’s mail is all coupons and junk mail, plus a flyer—obviously recent—calling for residents to show up to a town meeting about the water crisis. I’m about to chuck all of it when a manila envelope slides out from between a wedge of leaflets and skitters across the floor.

There’s no address, only a name marked in neat Sharpie: Ms. Abigail Williams.

As I reach for it, my whole body seems to pour down into my arm, into my fingers fumbling off the tape keeping it closed. Instinct. Premonition.

Inside, there is no note, only a dozen Polaroid photographs, all of high school girls. High school girls topless, posing, making kissy faces despite the obvious drunken blur of their eyes. Girls unconscious on couches, legs splayed so their underwear is visible. One naked, entirely, her face obscured by the glare of a flash.

Sophie Nantes is in one of the pictures, her skirt hitched to her waist, hair catching in smeary lipgloss, eyes half-lidded from alcohol. I sort through the photographs carefully, more than once, even though it turns my stomach.