The P.I is not a bad man. Molly wouldn’t have contracted him otherwise. He is merely unethical, encumbered with a vein of compassion no amount of money could drain. In a different life, he might have been a hero, a hunter, armored in whaleskin leather and dressed in blades. Not here, though. Where the law defangs, defuses, defeats any instinct but the urge to hunker down and endure.

Molly smiles, shrugs carefully. Her skin feels too tight, the ridges of her vertebrae jagged against the underside of her skin. She is afraid that if she moves too quickly, her epidermis will split, disgorging clumps of muscle and slivers of change-whetted bone, the hair of the accountant from the night before, snarled like yarn in the pit of her belly, a bezoar in infancy.

“I know.”

The P.I hesitates, nails digging into the sheaf of brown folders, held out like temple offerings. She can tell he is second-guessing himself, weighing the consequence of a refund, balancing this month’s rent with a lifetime of guilt.

“I made a promise,” she adds. “A promise to wait seven years.”

He does not ask her why, or what she intends after that statute of seven. Some secrets are best left buried in the earth. Besides, there is something mythic about her proclamation, an officiousness that resonates with his intrinsic humanity, an honesty that borders on religious hypothesis. The P.I., who is really a good man in a terrible world, slumps, suddenly old.

“Seven years?” he asks, and in the echoes of the words, she can hear him beg don’t hurt her, please don’t hurt the girl.

“Seven years,” she lies.

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She calls him again, tells him about the accountant but not the detective, or her roadmap of a woman’s daily rituals, demarcated by activity and hour, the photographs of a little girl with dark, thoughtful eyes.

“It was a mistake,” she says, power writhing like a butterfly trapped beneath her skin.

“You ate him?” he whispers, incredulous. The revelation frightens him.

“The world is better without someone like him.”

His riposte cuts her. “That’s not up to you to say.”

Molly’s anger thumps against the cup of her skull, a warning she can’t quite define, full of thunder, full of danger, full of rot. Her mouth thins and her blood grows hot. She runs her tongue over sharp teeth that are no longer short.

“He was just meat,” she tells him, still blood-drunk, still warm from the fat she suckled from the accountant’s breast. “A wastrel. No one will miss him.”

“What you’re doing is not right.”

She chokes on his defense, on the memory of his defense, of all the times he’d prescribed life to the undeserving, of all the times he had told her to sit, sit, stay, good girl, stay. For a moment, she loathes him.

“It’s not like I can get caught.”