It was Amanda who had brought me a yellow envelope one day shortly after our first case together, a package containing papers detailing exactly what she’d managed to find out about the man who really did abduct and rape Claire. I’d been too scared to look very closely at them. She hadn’t pushed me on the issue. It was my decision what I did with the investigation of my own case, and in the weeks that had followed, all the envelope brought me was worry and terror at the possibilities. Maybe if I went looking for Claire’s attacker, I’d never find him. Maybe I would find him, and he’d get away. Maybe I’d try to find him, and only further implicate myself somehow, or be unable to prove it was he who’d attacked Claire Bingley. Maybe I’d ignore the envelope altogether, and he’d do it again, and this time he’d kill someone, and that would be my fault. I didn’t think any good could come of what was contained in the envelope, no matter what happened.

I heard Amanda thump back up onto the porch.

“How many geese did you have before?”

“Seven,” I groaned, pulling my legs toward me slowly, easing my way up onto my elbows. “Six gray, one white.”

“Yeah, they’re all there.” She sniffed, kicked the porch door closed behind her like she owned the place. “They’re just puffed up. Cranky.”

“I’m pretty cranky myself.” I staggered to my feet. She slipped under my arm and tried to help me to the bathroom, but being so small, she wasn’t very useful. I smeared blood on the doorframe, made footprints on the divorce paperwork my wife had sent me, still unsigned. In the bathroom mirror, my face was awash with blood, one-half swelled so that the eye was a slit between two purple lumps, patterned with a cross from lying on the kitchen tiles.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“I figured something was up,” Amanda said, helping me to sit on the edge of the bathtub. “You don’t go to bed till ten. Weren’t answering your phone.”

“How do you know I don’t go to bed till ten?”

“I’m a supersleuth. An investigative genius. A deductive savant.”

“I might have been out. Had visitors.”

She laughed as she wet a washcloth in the sink. She was right, of course. I went to bed at exactly ten. In prison, lights out had been exactly eight. So I’d extended my sleep time to normal adult hours when I was freed, but I kept to the exact timings because too much free will was still uncomfortable for me. I got up at six. Had breakfast at six thirty. Lunch at midday. I went to my room to go to sleep at exactly 9:45 p.m. and played with my phone until lights out. Nothing else felt right.