And in it, now she does see a writer. Not a child, not a little girl, but a woman, with strong features, in shape, her hair pulled back, some wisdom in the anxious face above the tank top she wears. Her hand moves across the page with elegance, grace, not too different from a piano player, she thinks, and for the first time in her life, Kit thinks: You could do this forever.

Writing, she means. And the act of putting real emotion, real fears, on paper. It’s something she’s never even explained to Dana, her closest friend, never even tried to describe the sensation of a second person, a friend, the journal, in the room with her, the moment the pen touches the page. Like she’s truly talking to someone, a person who would understand her more than any doctor ever could, certainly more than the doctors she was sent to following her unfathomably panicked call to 911. Who calls 911 on themselves? And for the reasons Kit did? But never mind that now, forget it, because the journal is open, Jolly is listening, and Kit pours it all out. The horror she feels, the doubt in her assumptions, the lack of faith in the police outside, the worry for her parents and what finding their daughter crushed might do to them. It’s awful, every bit of this nightmare Samhattan is experiencing at once. It’s cruel and it’s unfair and Kit just wants it to go away, oh Jolly, don’t you see? Is there anything you can do? And isn’t it kinda right that the city is going through this? When something is suppressed, it eventually comes out. When something is ignored, it eventually makes noise. And the sound is louder than any sound you can make, and the entire world is eclipsed by the bad decision you made (here, the whole city made, yes: Kit believes Samhattan and all who run it have intentionally buried the myth of Daphne).

There is nothing to be done but to wait for that noise, that unearthing, and, in this case, for Kit, to write.

She sees herself in the mirror again. Lean. Her fingers that are so fluent with the basketball, gripping the pen, expressing herself. Her shoulders are even with the posters on the wall behind her. Her legs are crossed. One sneaker held suspended above the carpet, the other flat to the floor. And beside that second shoe, tucked just under the bed, close enough to be seen, clearly, in the glass, a face looking directly at her.

“Hello, girl,” the man says.

Kit leaps up. The journal falls to the floor. The entire world feels blurred, like it’s moving too fast, like it’s unreal, like this isn’t happening.

But she knows it is.

“Help,” she says.

She says it quiet the first time. A sound a shy person might make. Someone who’s had half their voice destroyed by bare hands.

The man under the bed grips the box spring as Kit reaches the open window. As if he’s going to crawl out now.