But having someplace to go, having a routine and a purpose in my life, might have saved me. I shudder to think what I would have been doing with my time if I hadn’t had a job to go to.

Those dark days nearly swallowed me up. Every day, just waking up felt like an ascent out of the depths of a deep, slippery pit. If I slid back in there again, I’m not sure I’d ever pull myself out. I study the floor, the cabinets, the familiar space. Everything menaces me. The bottle that could be turned into jagged, cutting shards. The knives in their block. The gas oven.

“No,” I say. “No, no. Not that.”

I summon willpower and push the bottle of Rowan’s back across the counter into the corner. I grab a dish towel and drape it over the bottle.

“Okay,” I say. “Eat something. Act like a normal human being and eat something.”

I find some ham in the refrigerator. It smells okay, so I make a sandwich. My hands shake while I spread mayonnaise on the bread, but the act also feels reassuring. A normal thing in an abnormal time.

Before I can take a bite, someone knocks on the back door. I nearly jump out of my skin. And Grendel barks like we’re being invaded by zombies.

I think about not answering. It’s ten thirty. The curtains are drawn. Maybe they don’t know I’m inside. Maybe it’s all a mistake. Wrong house.

But I’m acting the fool. Someone coming to the back door knows me. Preston?

I’m happy to toss the sandwich aside and go over and part the curtains on the window. My initial reaction is to say, “Shit.”

It’s Madeline, her arms crossed, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as she tries to stay warm. She looks small, like a child coming in from playing outside. Sometimes I see all my students this way. Small, young, vulnerable. Jake would be a college student now, and I feel the knife gouge in my heart just thinking about him and the future he’ll never have.

But Madeline is here. On my stoop.

I pull back, wondering if she saw me.

Everything I learned at the police station about Sophia Greenfield’s death comes back to me. And I knew her. At least in some way, I knew her. In my mind, I knew her much, much better. In my imagination, she’d grown to be larger than life.

And the only person who knows the details of Sophia’s death, besides the cops, is Madeline.

She knocks again, her palm pounding against the door, rattling the glass.

“Come on, Connor. I’m freezing my ass off.”

Of course she knows I’m here. She saw the lights, likely saw me through the window.