Elisabeth seemed more concerned with striking a pose; she was probably quite aware that she was the most physically striking out of the three of you. You seem insecure and more anonymous than your friends in the pictures, and in more than one, you were looking at Elisabeth in the moment the flash went off, as if to gauge how to pose, whether to smile.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what your mother said, and what happened to you. I thought about it so much that it almost felt like I, too, was there and that I’d shared the experience with you. I could practically feel the fear you must have felt crashing through that terrifying forest, all alone, the sound of the gunshot reverberating in your head. I saw what you must have seen – the girl crumpling to the ground, a spray of blood lingering for a moment on the air that had held her, fragments of her skull landing on your skin. I could smell the sweet scent of rot on the air, the sulfur of the gunpowder, the cruel murderer’s rancid body odor. I built these images in my mind obsessively, not really understanding that my preoccupation with them was just another of my brain’s escape fantasies.

I was even jealous of your trauma, Kristina. It’s true. I think what I mean by that is that I craved a tragic story of my own, something as big and shocking as the Carúpano shooting, that would explain why I have spent so much of my life feeling so empty, so ravaged by grief, so utterly alone. I had an absent father and a self-obsessed mother who doesn’t like me very much, and a failed marriage to a man who rejected me in myriad little ways every day, but those things aren’t exactly reasons to feel so broken. Or are they? You always made me feel like my feelings were valid, whatever they were. When I think back at how you used to make me feel, I miss you so intensely that it takes my breath away. I wish we could go back to that time when I’d sit across from you in our sessions and drink in your kind, attentive presence, when you were all I needed, and entirely mine for fifty minutes each week. I wish I hadn’t done what I’ve done.