The last time you used the letter opener against your throat you just didn’t go deep enough. You can fix that. You can be free from the past. Next time, you can make sure you go as deep as you need to go.

Until then, he found the X-ACTO knife and went to work freeing the bugs that were trying to climb out of his left side.

60

Two broken ribs and a lacerated liver.

Even for someone much younger, the injuries would have been serious, but for someone Calvin’s age, the lacerated liver could be life-threatening.

The doctors kept him in the ICU so they could monitor him more closely.

I tried to sort through where we were at.

Ralph suspected Greer of being complicit in Sasha’s death.

It was unfathomable to me.

As I considered the possibility, it struck me again that she was dead. Unequivocally dead. Now and forever gone.

We still hadn’t been able to track down where she’d been when she suffocated. We didn’t have a body; we just had proof of what’d happened with a video that was watched by nearly six thousand people and downloaded hundreds of times before it was finally taken down.

I’d met Marcus Rockwell, Krazle’s founder, last summer and had been impressed by him. Sharp. Clear-headed. Generous and unpretentious for a thirty-one-year-old billionaire.

The last I heard, just fourteen percent fewer people were doing online searches using Krazle than Google—and things were trending in their direction. And as far as a social networking platform, Krazle was on its way to surpassing Facebook in the number of daily user interactions.

Though Jon Murray had streamed his suicide through 4chan, the others had all used Krazle.

If Marcus’s platform was being used to post and share live-streamed suicides, I thought he would likely do all he could to stop that. I made a mental note to call him in the morning and see if we could have a little talk about what Krazle was and was not doing in this arena and how he could help shut this down.

The details about Greer’s abduction and how he was overpowered were still murky—he’d been following an executive car that’d picked up Sasha. He stopped at a red light, and a person dressed as a vagrant walked up and started to clean his windows for a tip.

When Greer lowered his window to wave the man away, someone else leapt out of the shadows, and the two men overpowered Greer—somehow getting him out of his car. They restrained him and hooded him, then drove him to a warehouse where Mannie was waiting for them.

Ralph had a point.

It did look suspicious.