A Samhattan myth, okay. One she should’ve known more about. Okay. But Kennedy happened to be keyed into the mind-as-real-estate idea, and so it bothered her how much room Zach’s story was taking up in her head.

It stuck with her for the duration of her shift. His urgency, his passion, his belief.

Still, this Kennedy could live with. She could also handle the idea that something a little weird happened at work. Zach had gotten all worked up over some graffiti in the breakroom. But the part Kennedy wasn’t prepared for was how the name, brought to her attention, then examined within, made her feel.

It almost tickled the mind, that name. Bare fingers on the brain.

Who wrote it on the wall?

Later in her shift, alone in the breakroom to eat, the words looked like they were written in spider:

DAPHNE LIVES

She sat facing the microwave counter, the writing in view. She thought of those other two words too:

Bare hands.

It was almost ridiculous, right? Almost…too inviting. How could she not be immediately interested in the legend of a woman who used her hands, the very things Kennedy Lichtenstein did not have, to kill? Kennedy studied the wall as she ate. The words were spectacularly ugly. Almost like the letters were rendered with ink at the tip of a greasy finger. And the wall was stained, too, with employee meals, messes made over months. As she stared, she internalized. The name, yes, but the story too. Kennedy was no stranger to living life on the fringe. She wouldn’t dream of existing anywhere else. From the fringe you had a great view of what really mattered. You recognized drama. Futility. Kindness and intelligence too.

Did Daphne see truth out there? In her day? From her fringe?

Later, when Kennedy punched out for the night, as she took her time card from the slot, she saw, on the wall behind it, the faded impression of those very same letters. Though smaller, the impact was twice as big:

DAPHNE LIVES

Someone had tried to scrub these away. She could tell. Zach was already gone for the night and even if he wasn’t, she didn’t think it was a good idea to show him.

Or did he know? And a stranger, more curious thought: Did he write them himself?

Now, walking the gravel road that splits the cemetery into two equal halves, the sky dark, it’s easy for Kennedy to examine how powerful the name became in just a few days’ time. She started looking for it in other places and finding it. First, at work: Behind boxes on the shelves in back. Under a register. In a staff bathroom stall. Then, in the bathroom stall of a bar on Sixth Street. In a dressing room at Just Jackets at the mall. And each time she found it, Zach’s story got a little more real. As if Daphne, the woman, grew another inch with each unearthing of her name. The night Tammy Jones was killed, Kennedy had started rereading the book about mental real estate, Your Mind, Your Land, using the Daphne story as an experiment, attempting to make physical room in her head, to “evict the thought” rather than accepting it as her burden. But it seemed the more she tried, the harder it stuck. And the longer this went on, the deeper Daphne’s roots descended, until it seemed Daphne owned this land as much as Kennedy did. By the time Melanie Jack was killed, Kennedy had fallen deep into self-examination, wondering, in an almost scientific way, why she couldn’t stop thinking about Daphne.