I want to tear it all down, too. But I don’t want anyone to die. That’s my predicament. With how things are, the tearing down and the killing of people are inextricably linked. The infrastructure. The infrastructure is both the infrastructure and the guarantor of life now. What you have done—is that the predicament coming to its head?

In one direction, the forced conclusion, to let it stand—that’s where I am.

In the other direction, forced also, to tear it apart, one home at a time, huddled groups of deaths—that’s where you are.

I wonder, if in the constant consideration of the predicament, one can be forced from one side to the other.

She shredded the letter.

Dear Killer,

When I’m ovulating I have more fantasies about sex. But fantasies is the wrong word for them this month. I’m imagining I’m having sex with you and I dislike it. Not that you’re raping me. I’m liking the sex. And it’s because I’m enjoying it, and you, that I dislike it. I’m feeling horrible about it at the same time as it’s happening. Or sometimes I’m enjoying it but you’re physically disgusting, for example you smell like fish, or your hair is unwashed. And I know, realistically, I couldn’t enjoy sex with someone who smells like fish, but that’s why it’s just imagining something. And I hope, too, that I couldn’t enjoy sex with someone who’s killed people, but I know I probably could.

She shredded the letter. And then she wrote a letter to Cami instead.

Dear Cami,

I think there’s a future where you grow up to be a serial killer. And me, too. But I don’t wonder how I became disturbed. My mother’s death. The Turning. I’m not the person I might have been. But you. If you become disturbed, you might wonder how that happened.

So let me tell you that your father has killed people—in a post-surgery-complication kind of way—and he’s always moved on from that. All doctors have lost patients. And all families have made decisions about their aging parents. And people caused other people’s deaths in car accidents, when they used to happen, when people drove cars.

I could go on, but it doesn’t matter. What I’m trying to say is that we’re all going to be held accountable for some amount of death at some point in our lives.

If you take some agency in that relationship with death that you will negotiate over the course of your life—if you do that—you won’t be the first.

She shredded that letter, too.

Dear Cami,