When Rebecca finally left his office, she felt a little off-balance. She wasn’t really sure if Hoffman had interrogated her out of genuine concern for a former student in trouble or for some other reason. Two years had passed since Madeline disappeared—did Hoffman think he was going to solve the case by asking about Madeline’s love life when the cops must have already dug into all of that?

After World History—and the stories about Henry VIII slicing off the heads of his wives, stories her professor told with a sly smile on his face—Rebecca heads to her job at the public library downtown. She spends four hours there, shelving books off a cart, which she thinks is just about the best job a writer could have. She rolls the cart into the far reaches of the library, picks up a book, and if it strikes her interest, she stands around, paging through it, seeing if it’s a book she might want to check out and read on her own someday.

Someday when she has money to buy all the books she wants.

Someday when she has all the time in the world to read on her own.

Rebecca waits for the bus at six when her library shift ends. The wind blows straight into her face, and she turns her head to the side as she waits on the brightly lit sidewalk. Mercifully, the bus arrives quickly, and she steps into the warmth. The bus is never full, and it’s only five blocks to her apartment, but she refuses to walk once the sun goes down. Not since Madeline disappeared. Rebecca looks back at some of the times she’s walked or jogged in the dark and wonders what she was thinking. She always assumed a place like Gatewood was safe, that nothing that bad could ever happen here. Clearly she’d been way wrong. She still carries in her left coat pocket the pepper spray she bought.

She trudges up to the second-floor apartment she shares with her roommate, Mikaila. As she goes up the steps, Rebecca hopes against hope Mikaila isn’t home. Or if Mikaila is here, that she is alone. Mikaila and her boyfriend, Steven, have been spending more and more time in the apartment, sprawled out on the couch watching Netflix, or giggling—loudly—in Mikaila’s bedroom. Rebecca wants to ask but never does why they don’t spend their time at Steven’s place since he lives alone near campus.

But Rebecca hears them giggling through the door before her key even goes into the lock, and when she steps inside, Mikaila—her bare legs intertwined with Steven’s on the couch—shivers in an exaggerated fashion.

“Oh, God,” she says. “It’s awful outside.”

“Sorry,” Rebecca says. “But that’s the only way I can get inside. Through the door.”