I copied that down when I read it. I copied it into a little blue notebook devoted to Calvin’s death, my self-conscious attempt at documenting a case I’d had no business trying to puzzle out. But by the time I returned to L.A., almost three months had passed without any further word from Ray, and I left the notebook in a box I still hadn’t managed to unpack. I unearthed it now and flipped through the pages, noting my self-consciously tight, readable hand. As if I had expected someone to find it someday, and that someone to see that I had tried to understand him.

I tossed the notebook back in the box and looked around my bedroom, with its one nightstand and one lamp, the obvious solo occupancy. Books spilled over every surface. A woman was supposed to know how to make a home, and I just wanted a place to think and read and sleep.

Prints of night-city skylines circled me on the walls. Bangkok, Cairo, London, Vancouver, their skyscrapers aglow with lights. Globetrotting dreams courtesy of the apartment’s owner. What would I hang now? What images would tell people who I was inside? When I closed my eyes, I saw the case file, I saw the gallery, I saw the crew sorting shoes. I saw the proprietary way Nelson reached for Layla’s breast, and the compliance in her face as she bent to him. I also saw Ray, wherever he was in L.A., staring into space, seeing these same things, trying to work the puzzle together into a picture.

When you’re doing a puzzle, you often start with the edges. The frame. The frame dictates the composition: how far or close up you see the castle or horse in the picture and how it’s arranged in relation to everything else. In the death report, the frame was Brenae’s suicide—where she did it, how she did it, how she died. The detectives had looked closely, intently, at the series of actions that preceded her taking her life. They’d interviewed witnesses and found evidence that proved Brenae’s death at her own hand.

Listening to the students today, however, the frame changed for me. How Brenae died didn’t exactly matter. How she had lived mattered more: what she wanted, what she needed, whom and what she loved. In her last week alive, she had reached out to Janis Rocque for help. She had also contacted her brother. Why were Janis and Davi the only ones she’d sought, when she knew so many people at LAAC? Why did she distrust Layla so much? What had happened in London?