“You lost your girlfriend, you lost your best friend, to reach out and help a killer?”

Zack has no answer for that. There is nothing to say, no good defense, for the absurdity of Zack’s choice.

“So who’s the crazy one, Zack? Really. Who’s the crazy one?”

They sit there a little longer with nothing more to say to each other. With nothing ever to say to each other, not really.

They regard each other through the divider. For what, Zack knows, will be the last time. Probably Joey knows it too.

A divide, too, of culture, upbringing, circumstance, and opportunity that could hardly be any greater.

Joey Richter. Zack Yellin.

One, a killer who coldly, brutally cut lives short.

While together, they saved lives by the dozen.

89.

89.

At the end of the visit, Zack exits the prison. A pat-down, an interview, that echoes, bookends, the procedures of his entrance.

Exiting the prison—merely as a visitor—he is embarrassed to experience a sense of liberation. He knows how lucky he is that the prison behind him is merely symbolic for him. That he can walk away.

Exiting the prison of the story. The prison of events. Emerging from the insanity into the light. Finishing out, at last, his own weird sentence in the spotlight, in the crosshairs. In certain ways an unbearably long sentence. In certain ways a mercifully brief one.

As he heads out to the parking lot, he texts Emily.

She pulls their rented car up to the curb.

Emily, who drove here to upstate New York with him. Who’s been waiting for him patiently while he visits Joey. Pulling up now to the prison lot curb like she’s picking Zack up from an errand. Like an elderly couple that always does their errands together.

This is something he had to do, this visit.

And she never questioned it. She understood.

“Now, unfortunately, it’s the long drive back,” Zack says.

“GPS says three hours forty minutes,” says Emily, turning the car toward the exit gate.

“I could definitely use some coffee,” says Zack. “Didn’t we pass a GreenGirl a few miles back?”

Emily smiles. “Sure did.”

“What do you say?”

“I say absolutely.” Emily looks over now from the driver’s seat, grinning. “But only if you promise to hang on to your phone in there.”

A month ago, Zack finally got rid of the disposable and got another iPhone. He looks down at it now. All its possibilities. All its coiled, compressed power. Staring back up at him.

This mute, inanimate object that is anything but mute and inanimate. That is the opposite of mute and inanimate.

It’s a liePhone, Zack thinks cynically.

It’s a slyPhone.

A cryPhone.

A sighPhone.

A lastgoodbyePhone.

A onemoretryPhone.

A neverknowwhyPhone.

But at least, presumably, no longer a diePhone.

“It stays in my pocket,” Zack says. “I promise.”

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