Now, they have an old refrigerator that came with the rental house, but the first thing she did was to put all the old school photos and recipes in the exact same place as when they lived with Brent in Georgia. Jason’s sixth-grade school picture, cowlick sticking straight up, a grin so big his eyes are closed. A picture of Jason holding Harvey, held in place with a magnet Jason had given her around that same time, which says chillin with my peeps, because he was begging her to buy him some little chicks like they’d seen under the heat lamps at Feed and Seed.

Refrigerators are to keep your food from going bad and to hold family photos, not corpses. Bodies in freezers, many bodies in freezers over the course of her career, and there have also been bodies in the river, many bodies in the river, bodies in trash cans, bodies identified from half-decomposed tattoos, many spouses gone missing, falling down stairs, attacked by owls, dosed with arsenic by their concerned loved ones: she even read about all those things back then, Ted Bundy and what have you, and Brent always said it made him feel so much better about their—he said “their”—life to hear the stories she was reading and what she brought home from work; in fact sometimes they even laughed at the sheer horror of it all, but once she was alone again with just the kids, the terror returned and was magnified, the knowledge of how easily one human can choose to do away with another.