“That was a joke. He was bored, he had time on his hands—he was messing about, just to see what people online would say. That’s all.”

“And the wolf trap in your attic? The holes in your walls? The video monitors? Were those jokes too?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. The holes in the walls just happened, those houses are built from crap, they’re all falling to bits—the monitors, those were just Pat and the kids playing, just to see if—”

“Mrs. Spain,” I said, “listen to me. We’re the only ones here. I’m not recording anything. I haven’t cautioned you. Anything you say can never be used as evidence.”

Plenty of detectives take this gamble on a regular basis, betting that if the suspect talks once, the second time will come easier, or that the unusable confession will point them towards something they can use. I don’t like gambles, but I had nothing and no time to lose. Jenny was never going to give me a confession under caution, not in a hundred years. I had nothing to offer her that she wanted more than the sweet cold of razor blades, the cleansing fire of ant poison, the calling sea, and nothing to brandish that was more terrifying than the thought of sixty years on this earth.

If her mind had held even the smallest chance of a future, she would have had no reason to tell me anything at all, whether or not it could send her to prison. But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk off the edges of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.

That was the one thing I had to offer Jenny Spain: a place to put her story. I would have sat there while that blue sky dimmed into night, sat there while over the hills in Broken Harbor the grinning jack-o’-lanterns faded and the Christmas lights started to flash out their defiant celebrations, if that was how long it took her to tell me. As long as she was talking, she was alive.

Silence, while Jenny let that move around her mind. The shaking had stopped. Slowly her hands uncurled from the soft sleeves and reached out for the drawing on her lap; her fingers moved like a blind woman’s over the four yellow heads, the four smiles, the block-lettered EMMA in the bottom corner.

She said, just a thin thread of whisper trickling through the still air, “It was getting out.”

Slowly, so as not to spook her, I leaned back in my chair and gave her room. It was only when I moved back that I realized how hard I had been trying not to breathe the air around her, and how light-headed it had left me. “Let’s go from the beginning,” I said. “How did it start?”