I was trying to process the details he’d laid out. It chilled me that Harris had been there; I didn’t remember that at all. It made sense that my father would send him to clean up the scene—Harris’s military background and total lack of ethics would’ve been assets in that—but I couldn’t understand why he’d told Badem to be ready earlier in the day. It was as if he’d known something terrible was going to happen.

Or, perhaps, he was going to make something terrible happen.

“And after you waited outside?” I asked.

“Harris came back and ordered me to come in. He said I had to keep quiet, not say a word. We went to an apartment on the first floor. You were there, lying on the floor. There was a beautiful girl lying next to you.” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his palms. “She was dead. There was a knife in her chest. Blood was still pouring out of her body. It was getting on you.”

“But the knife . . .” My throat constricted; it was almost impossible to choke the words out. “The knife was in my hand.”

“Because Harris put it there,” Badem said. “You were out cold. After he moved the knife, Harris told me to wake you up. I tried shaking you. Harris told me to stop being so delicate and slapped you a couple of times. It was impossible to wake you up. I told Harris I couldn’t, and he said we had to. He said it was the whole point—you had to see this.”

A vicious thought had been coiling around my brain as soon as Badem mentioned Harris. I wanted to throw up. I’d spent more than a decade with the awful certainty that I was a killer, only to find out that I had been set up. If Mehmet Badem could be believed, Harris had murdered Mirelle while I was dead to the world.

“You finally came around, and you were very confused. You stared at the dead girl for a long time, like you couldn’t focus. Then you screamed ‘Mirelle!’ over and over. You were crying. You tried to get up, but Harris was holding your head down. I was holding your body in place.”

I remembered seeing Mirelle’s dead body and screaming. I’d had no sense of time, or how I’d stabbed her. I’d never understood why I’d attacked her in the first place—the voices in my head quieted when violence was done to me, not when I committed it. What I’d struggled to understand was how I’d blacked out from blood loss, yet had enough strength to attack and kill Mirelle. For the first time, the fog in my head lifted.

“I didn’t call my father, asking for help, did I?”