Quincy was drinking earlier. She’ll be drinking later.

Natasha reaches the top.

“Mom?”

She takes the hall to her parents’ bedroom.

“Yo, Mom.”

She enters and checks the master bathroom. Empty. She pauses at the walk-in closet just outside the bathroom door. She waits.

Did she hear it again? Mom couldn’t be so drunk she’d be in the closet, right?

She opens it. Parts the hanging clothes. But Mom isn’t passed out in the closet.

“Mom?”

She leaves the bedroom and thinks: What if I feel this way forever now? And what if I want to? What if I spend the rest of my life seeking bad situations because I’ll only ever feel good if I feel bad?

Is this how Kit felt when she called 911?

She hears Quincy in the office. She enters.

A sudden thought crosses her mind: Will I still be funny? When this is all over…will I still make people laugh?

She looks past the person sitting in the office chair, looks to the window because, down on the grass, Quincy is wearing a bright-pink shirt. Caught her eye.

Mom. Outside. Dad in the basement.

Natasha looks to the person sitting in the office chair.

Her first thought is that she’s wrong. This person can’t be sitting, after all. She’s as tall as Natasha. She must be standing.

“Oh,” Natasha says. Something cold in her throat. “Oh no.”

She backs up. Even as the person sitting (yes, she was sitting) rises to her full height. Even as the top of the woman’s head touches the ceiling.

“Oh God.”

Daphne is only three feet from her. She wears headphones, the cord snaking down the collar of her jean jacket, the long denim sleeves.

She’s thumping her black boots to the beat she hears.

Natasha runs.

She’s down the hall in seconds, almost falls down the stairs, catches herself, grips the railing, hits the first floor running to the back door.

“MOM! DAD!”

Through the kitchen, to the back door, she kicks it open, rushes to Quincy on the grass.

She grabs her by the pink sleeve. She’s shaking. She thought she knew how bad it could get. She was wrong.

“She’s in the house,” Natasha says. “Mom, she’s in the fucking house.”

Quincy looks to the bedroom window.

“Dad’s in the house too,” Quincy says.

Then they’re both crossing the yard, exiting through the fence door, yelling for the police.

Both cruisers’ doors open. Guns drawn, three of the officers enter the house. The fourth radios the station. Tells them the killer is here. Right here. In the house. The Manska girl saw him.

“Her,” Natasha says. But Natasha is standing at the foot of the porch steps, too worried about Dad to go any farther from the house, too scared to get any closer.

Trauma. New. Newer. Seen upstairs in the office.

The fourth officer yells into his CB. Gives the address, talks fast. He rushes to join the others inside, bumps Natasha on the way.