She had let some air into the room and made up her bed with the sheets and blankets Chief Knauss had passed around. After a hot shower, she’d injected herself with her dose of insulin and unpacked the few personal belongings she’d brought from the city.

Outside the window, the streetlights in the courtyard illuminated the heaviest snowfall Teresa had seen in years. She stood watching the large flakes fall, looking for a sense of peace she hadn’t felt in a long time. She remembered the winters of her childhood, the houses buried almost to the roof in downy banks that the wind sculpted into waves, the toboggan slides down the hills, the tussles on the snow, and the benevolent weight of the crystals coming to rest upon her upturned face.

In the past few hours she had been deliberating whether to stay on this case. She could feel she was no longer able to push her body to the limits of what this investigation required. Of course, it would continue to do her bidding despite everything: her unreasonable demands, the many indicators of her ill-health, exhaustion, fear. The soreness in her muscles, the cold, the heat, the lack of sleep. The problem was that she just didn’t want to ask all that of her body any longer.

But at the same time, it wasn’t solely Teresa’s decision to make. The voices of the victims rang in her ears throughout the day, and only grew louder at night. They would not allow her to rest until the killer was found, the cycle of death broken.

Like a weary fighter, Teresa pulled the curtains shut over her memories, her own private needs. It was her way of picking up her weapons and getting back to her feet. From her bag, she took out a brand-new diary she’d bought that morning. She tore the plastic wrapper off and opened it, running her fingers over its pages.

The time had come to reorganize her daily life, to become even more methodical than before, and learn to be her own guardian. She would write down the salient moments of her life; she would start with that night from her past, until she would arrive, one day, at the future—for she wanted to record the dreams she had yet to realize, her ambitions, her plans, and everything else for which there was still room in her life, no matter how much time fate decided to assign to her. She also wanted to test her memory in the days ahead and see whether she would forget any of the things that happened to her. She was not going to surrender to the idea that she was sick.

On the first page of the diary, she wrote down the word she hadn’t yet been brave enough to say aloud: the name of the illness that had maybe—just maybe—begun its attack on her mind.