This goes on for several seconds, and I get the impression of another diver, someone’s lower body and arms. A flash of a double white stripe around a leg, a chest zipper with a long pull tag, and black neoprene gloved hands near my face. Benton. It must be Benton but it enters my mind crazily that I don’t remember his wet suit having a double white stripe. Then the only image is water, then nothing. My mask had come off. I back up the recording and replay it again and again as my disappointment grows. This isn’t helpful. In fact it’s worse than not helpful. It’s extremely harmful.

Carrie would have recognized the mini-recorder built into my mask. She knew she was being recorded. I’m sure she knows by now that she’s not identifiable. The lighting is poor, and I’m seeing her through bubbles streaming up from my regulator. I’m seeing my own movements as I reach around, frantically feeling the right side of my BCD, and then I’m slashing at someone I can’t see, madly slashing my dive knife at empty murky water.

“Please tell me this isn’t all there is.” I nudge the phone back in Donoghue’s direction, and I feel sick.

“I’m sorry,” Lucy says.

“Then how do we know it’s her? We can’t see who it is.” Donoghue is so close to me now our shoulders are touching. “And you were sure at the time it was her?”

“Yes. I’m completely sure.” I feel emptied of any hope I might have had. “What is this?” I say to Lucy. “What the hell am I looking at? I cut her with the knife. I cut her face.”

“I know you believed you did,” she says. “But based on this recording it doesn’t look like it.”

“A recording you got from who?” I can’t keep an accusatory tone out of my voice.

“What matters is who doesn’t have it.” Lucy’s demeanor is steady and still. “And I can promise the FBI doesn’t. My initial hope was we’d get to rub their noses in it but that’s not possible. Because all it would do is make things a thousand times worse. I’m sorry, Aunt Kay.”

“I remember cutting her,” I insist.

“I know you believe you did.”

“You sure she couldn’t have somehow Photoshopped it out?”

“I’m sure,” Lucy says. “I won’t explain why I know that.”

“I don’t want a technical hypothetical explanation. And just because it’s not on the recording doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Now I sound argumentative.

I sound ridiculous.

“It didn’t happen.” Lucy locks eyes with me as the boathouse door opens.

Lucy doesn’t look at Janet as she walks back in, quietly shutting the door behind her.

“Is this okay?” she asks Donoghue. “Am I allowed back?”