“I wish I knew who he was so I could stop him.”

“But you didn’t have the chance.”

“You didn’t have the chance! Because you were in his proximity doesn’t mean you had the chance.”

They didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and Izabel didn’t like pauses like that. “I’m scared for Cami,” she said.

“I think everyone’s scared for everyone right now. The whole town is scared.”

“It doesn’t feel like that.”

“No? All these people applied to leave and then some left. That was because of fear for their families and themselves.”

“But being here. Day to day. Everyone’s going about their lives. There’s no big change. It’s minor. It’s a shift more than a change.”

“Haven’t you talked to people about it? I’ve talked to people, and there seems to be a change in them and how they’re feeling.”

“I think that’s more about how much they want things to have changed. They want us to have had a real, robust change in response to violence, to the return of violence, but there hasn’t been one.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” Opa said.

“I haven’t thought it through. I’m talking shit.”

“Then think it through. Take a minute.”

But Izabel didn’t actually need a minute. It rushed out of her: “Maybe because there was more violence around us to start with than people realize. What the trees did, and are doing, can be seen as violence. Sickness is a violence. Death is a violence. Murder—criminal violence—it’s not so different.”

“Okay, so if that’s not enough to have made a change, but I’m saying that I see a change, what’s that from?”

“Maybe that’s because of the violence of randomness.”

“Were you scared of that?” Opa asked.

“I was, but not as much. Not as much as everyone else was. Not as much as I should’ve been.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know. Randomness is chaos, which is inherent to the universe and we survive it everyday, killer or not.”

“Does it bother you that it didn’t seem like people realized how violent it was before the killer started killing people?”

Izabel hung her head, shook it like she was shaking something out of her hair. “Yes,” she said.

Izabel picked up Cami at the play center. They’d given her a Pokémon card of Scatterbug and she was so delighted by it. “Do you want to go to the mall?” Izabel asked.

“Wait, Mom,” Cami said. “Watch this.”

So Izabel watched as Cami shook the Pokémon card over her head. Then she brought it back down and looked at it, disappointed.

“I thought it would change. Maybe I didn’t do it right.”

“Why did you think it would change?”