“Yeah. I guess.” We pulled up to the beach, parked near the bulkhead. For a minute we listened to the screams of seagulls, the shouts of children playing in the sand.

“Can I ask you something else?” I said, as we stepped out of the car.

“Sure,” she said.

“Did you ever—your visions—see anything about Emily?”

She shook her head. “That bothered me for a while. I don’t know why I didn’t. Some people are really closed off. I could never pick up anything from her, even when I was trying to so she’d let me into the spa. Maybe even when she died she was like that. Hard to read.”

“Yeah. She was definitely”—was, how I hated that past tense—“closed off, that’s for sure. In some ways I feel like I knew her well. I mean, we worked together all the time. But obviously I had no idea she had this other life. And I didn’t know anything about her family, her childhood. Still don’t, I guess.” I could only piece together scraps of information from what I had read in the paper. That the killer seemed focused on sex workers in particular. You’re not like the others. That they were in the process of interviewing other women who worked on the streets, but it was hard getting any of them to talk to the cops. I thought, too, of the way Emily had started fiddling with that necklace more and more often in those last few weeks. Those dark circles under her eyes.

Clara sighed. “I should have told you. I saw her out once. With a man. All dressed up. Different from how she was at work. The guy was like twenty years older than her. The situation was pretty clear, you know. That’s why I used to get so mad at her when she’d kick us out.”

I didn’t know what to say. Were there clues that I had missed? I thought of my first day at work, Emily showing me all of the places to sneak a look at your cell phone, where to stash a snack. How good she was at hiding in plain sight. Would it have made a difference, if I had known? Clara must have sensed what I was thinking. “People are going to do what they’re going to do, Lily.”

“So what happened to her … you think that’s fate?”

She shook her head. “I don’t believe in fate as much now. We all make choices, and sometimes those choices bring us to places we never expect. Those women made choices to go with that man without any way to know he would make a choice to do something evil. I’m trying to choose a normal life. You chose to ignore that moron ex-boyfriend of yours, to go your own way. We never have total control, but we all do our best, right?”