Christie mentioned to me one time that she’d read that the Village had been quarantined from the rest of the city because of cholera outbreaks in the 1800s while road construction was happening all around it. Afterward, they’d never corrected things, never straightened the roads out, leaving those distinctive serpentine streets.

Death had caused this corner of the city to remain anomalous and unique.

While thinking about that, on the way to the restaurant, I swung by a florist to pick up a rose for my wife.

++++

The man who’d been watching Timothy Sabian through the hidden camera in the novelist’s living room had planned to attend the book signing, but now some obligations at work were interfering with that plan.

He was also the one who’d shown up at the pier when Timothy was out there getting involved in some mischief by the trunk of his car.

Earlier in the day, through the video feed, he’d observed Timothy carrying Julianne’s body up from the basement.

It gave him an idea for a climax that would both be memorable and wrap things up with a neat and permanent bow.

It was time for some closure.

Time to move on.

It was just a matter of finding exactly the right victim to end on before killing Timothy, the boy he had raised until that monumental night when Timothy called 911 and told the police what his father liked to do in their basement.

++++

After her mom left, Tessa doodled in the church bulletin she was using as a bookmark in the Timothy Sabian novel Patrick had bought for her.

She turned the bulletin over to the empty space that was left for taking sermon notes and jotted,

I wish that I could paint the spaces
between the colors,

pronounce the silences
between the words,

bridge the gaps
between my thoughts.

I wish that I could touch the light

that threads its way through
the ever-present
rays of darkness
all around me.

The waters of this moment

rush over my head.

I drink in the truth

and find that it tastes
like tears

just as I suspected.

She slipped the bulletin back into the novel to mark her place, grabbed a quick bite for dinner, then, taking the book with her, she left for Timothy Sabian’s signing at the Mystorium.

51

From my experience, there isn’t necessarily a moment when you realize that it really is true love.

Sometimes it only occurs to you after the fact. After you kiss your woman, or you ease aside a trail of hair that has glanced down across her cheek, or you feel her take your hand and intertwine her fingers just so, in the way that only she does, and you realize, “I’m in love with this person. I am—and I have been for a while. I want to be with her forever.”