I look at Lucy as she talks, and her eyes are windows to the carnage inside her. It wouldn’t show up on a CT scan. It wouldn’t be visible in an autopsy. But evidence of the massacre is beneath the surface like the footprint of a fort rotted away centuries ago and buried by layers of sediment and soil. Lucy has rebuilt her big powerful life on top of what Carrie ruined, and were the two of them face-to-face in mortal combat, I no longer wonder who would emerge liberated and whole.

I’m confident that neither of them would.

“I honestly thought Natalie was going overboard in her worries about spying,” Lucy continues to explain, and I can tell she feels guilty. “I worried she was getting demented, that the cancer had spread to her brain.”

“Understandably,” I reply, but what I’m thinking is there are some things that can’t be restored anymore.

There are some battles that can’t be won. And if I imagine Lucy and Carrie in a duel, who would kill whom anyway? I hope I’m wrong. I hope it won’t prove to be the case that they can’t go on without each other. What would motivate either of them in their endless bloody tennis match if the other wasn’t across the net? I don’t know the answer but as Benton likes to say about dysfunction, It’s hard to give up your iron lung.

“I remember you telling me that Natalie had covered her computer cameras with tape,” I bring that up. “A lot of people do it but apparently she didn’t until she knew she was dying.”

“She put black tape over the webcams on her desktop, a tablet and also the laptop,” Lucy replies. “It’s an easy low-tech way to prevent someone from using your own computer to spy on you. Natalie routinely disabled built-in cameras on any personal electronic device she owned because she knew they can be activated remotely. And if the hacker is really skilled he can remotely alter the camera chip, disabling the indicator light so it no longer turns on when you’re being secretly recorded.”

“So taping over the camera lens was added for good measure,” I reply.

“At the time it just seemed wacky.”

“But what if it wasn’t?”

“That’s why we’re talking about this,” Lucy says. “I should have taken her seriously. If she hadn’t been so sick and saying such weird shit, I would have.”

“Did she ever mention concerns about Carrie?”

“No reason. All of us thought she was out of the picture for good.”

“Because she was locked up in a forensic facility for the criminally insane,” I presume. “And then after she escaped she got killed. Or that’s what we believed.”