Kyle is still asleep, snoring softly. She knew he tossed and turned much of the night as well before slipping into quiet slumber. She watches him sleep. She thinks about when they first met. She didn’t really notice him and then she did, running daily with a club at college past her Houston apartment, and he was all she could think about. The intensity of his gaze, the strength of his stride. She actually waited on the sidewalk for him to run past and asked him out for a coffee as he ran past; he was a shy college senior and she was a year out of college and already starting to write for bands. But he’d stopped and jogged back to her, smiling awkwardly, and she said, If not coffee, then a bottle of water so you can hydrate, and he’d laughed and asked her for her number and the next day they’d met for coffee. That young man is still somewhere inside Kyle, not yet eroded away. She touches his hair; he doesn’t awaken. His face is bruised from his fall on the greenbelt. She studies the marks as if they’re a map.

I love you, she wants to tell him, but she doesn’t.

Then she gets up and goes to the kitchen. She brews coffee and opens her laptop, half hoping that the Lakehaven police will have made an arrest, solved the case, and delivered justice. No such luck. Danielle’s murder isn’t even the lead on the front page of the Austin news website she reads. She’s overshadowed by a plane crash near Munich and a political scandal that blew up overnight; Danielle, older woman dead in a park, is halfway down the page. She reads the article. There’s not much there, mainly a few details about Danielle’s work as a lawyer who coordinated international adoptions. Her friend Francie, who convinced Iris to adopt from Russia, is quoted as saying what a wonderful person she was.

Very little on the kind of person she was. On the secrets she kept.

There is a mention that her teenage son and a friend found her. No mention of Julia by name. Small mercies.

Iris opens the neighborhood Faceplace page. The fear and panic are unabated. Iris reads each post, each comment. People are scared. Jumping at shadows, devolving into arguments about how to best protect themselves, one group still promising to wander the neighborhood like an unofficial patrol and others objecting to the whole idea, and it all gives Iris a headache.