When I swallowed, it felt like a blade was lodged in my throat. I stood in the center of the room again and waited for my chance. Lily needed my help. He was just one man, after all. Someone who stole library books, someone who was so afraid he needed to prey on other people’s fear. I would find a way to get out of there.

LUIS

HE RETURNS TO THE MOTEL one more time, unable to walk past the border where the parking lot meets the grass. He knows he needs to do something, to warn everyone, to make sure the women are found, but he thinks of all that he will lose if he is misunderstood. How dangerous it is for him to be the one who knows the truth. He sits at the edge of the lot, wondering what else he can do. A woman approaches him with a photograph of a teenage girl with bright purple hair.

For a moment the hair throws him, but then the realization lands like a punch. She’s one of them. The one with the tattoo on her chest.

He waves his arms, points to the marsh over and over. He refuses to go back, but she could help him. She has a kind face, though she is startled by his gestures, and her eyes get wide. He points again, each time feeling how impossible it is to ask someone to imagine the horror, to make them understand. She reaches in her bag, pulls out a pen, and he starts to wonder if that is a good idea—something she could use as proof. Something that would show he knew about the women before anyone else—she might misunderstand. He turns his back on her, senses her behind him as he walks away and panics. At the shoulder of the road he breaks into a run.

AT HOME he puts his treasured things in a pile, should he need to leave quickly. Whether because of the fires or because someone has seen him going into the marsh or just because it’s finally time. A set of clothes, the photograph of his grandmother, the sheaf of pictures his grandfather took from his hospital days. The two-dollar bill, the German bullet the doctors pulled from his grandfather’s leg. The paintings along the wall eye him, the room filled with lonely stares. As though they hadn’t come from him, hadn’t been made with his own hands.