To some people this would sound like Confucian gibberish. But it’s not. I know what it’s like to do something terrible because something terrible has been done to you. Karma in reverse.

Hope gets it. She relaxes a little, the tendons in her neck going soft, her palms spreading flat on the table.

‘You want to tell me what happened?’ I ask. There are sixteen more victims to investigate—I’m keen to get to the point.

She nods. ‘I … I guess that’s the other reason I’m here.’

I wait. She opens her mouth, half purses her lips, as though she’s not sure how to pronounce the words. I can see her growing more and more distressed by her own silence.

But I’ve already figured it out.

‘Why don’t you start from when you met Shannon Luxford,’ I say.

Then the whole story comes rushing out.

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 19

You throw away the outside and keep the inside, then you eat the outside and throw away the inside. What am I?

He gave her a business card in the library on her first day of college. No job title, just social media links and his name—Shannon Luxford. A handsome guy with the Ben Affleck chin, twenty-one, a cute curl of black hair and shoulders like a footballer.

‘The first few weeks are hard,’ he said. ‘Fun, but hard. Get in touch if you need help, okay? Or advice, or just someone to talk to. I mean it.’

‘I have a boyfriend,’ she said. Which was true. Peter was small and pale, perpetually hunched like Gollum over some arcane thing. He often tried to explain what he was working on—yesterday a new kind of cryptocurrency, today a method for synthesising guitar sounds—and she never understood his explanations. Peter was a skilled programmer, but a poor communicator. He didn’t realise this, however, and Hope could tell he thought she was stupid.

‘Lucky guy,’ Shannon said, with an easy smile. ‘Don’t worry, I have a girlfriend back home. Anyway, the offer still stands, okay?’ He checked his gleaming watch. Hardly anyone Hope knew wore a wristwatch. ‘I gotta go to class. See you round, Hope.’

‘See you round, Shannon,’ she said, copying his tone. She wondered if she sounded like she was mocking him in a flirty way, or if she just seemed like a parrot.

He didn’t approach her again, not directly. The next few weeks of classes passed in a blur of confusing paperwork and bullshit introductory lectures full of things she already understood, hidden behind a cloaking device of buzzwords and nonsense. When her communications professor started talking about ‘structuration’, she nearly walked out.