I have received your message regarding your inability to pay for the damages you have caused my studio. You are correct that insurance will cover much of the accident. But insurance won’t cover it all. Your actions have cost more than a set and props. Your actions—no, your negligence has cost me the movie of a lifetime. It is an immeasurable loss. Your refusal to pay is unacceptable.

Let me be clear about one thing. You were only involved in the project at all because your wife insisted on it. If I wanted her, I’d have to use your subpar services, too. Had I known you were going to send my movie quite literally up in smoke, I would have gotten another director.

You should be very careful what enemies you make in this town, Mr. Kill. I do not lose. Remember, you are not the only one indebted to me. I will get my money from you, or from your wife, one way or another. I have other jobs for her. Jobs she performed for me long before you came along. She is quite good at what she does. Although I doubt very much you would want to see her in action.

My lawyer will be in touch with you regarding a payment plan.

The letter was finished with a scribble that was mostly illegible but came at me in glittery purple. The Hollis name.

I read the letter a second time, and then a third, and then let it fall to the bed. The orange and brown, the sparkly lilac pulsed up at me, taunting me. All these years, I’d thought my life was relatively normal, save for this one thing. My mom’s murder. A huge thing, yes, but in my mind it had always been random. It had always been the bad luck of the Kill family.

But now I was beginning to grasp the truth: that Mom was caught up in something bigger than she’d ever imagined. That she wanted out but felt trapped. That she was paying for someone else’s mistake.

That someone else was my father.

Angrily, I brushed the letters off the bed. They fluttered to the floor, appearing no more threatening than any other piece of paper. They turned the carpet around them an inky, rusty boil of betrayal and outrage. It smoldered, making me feel physically ill. I could hear my dad puttering around downstairs, opening and closing the refrigerator, scooting chairs around, whistling. As if his life had never been anything but perfect.

I flopped back onto my pillow, trying to get the letters out of my range of vision, and stared at the ceiling. My eyes burned and watered, not with sadness or disappointment, but with anger.

I understood what had happened now.