“I don’t know when it was exactly. You could look it up, probably. I sent her a message. He had been acting weird,” Stephanie said. Her voice was tiny. I held the phone toward her. “He was attached by a fucking string to his phone. It went everywhere with him. Even into the shower. My girlfriends said that that’s when you know—when they start taking the phone to the bathroom with them instead of leaving it hanging around the house. So I went through it. The only time I could get at the phone was when he was asleep. All the messages were deleted. All the texts. All the Facebook chats. I saw this girl I didn’t know in his list and I sent her a message.”

“Who this?” I said. Stephanie lifted her eyes to me.

“Yes. That was the message.”

“She didn’t answer.”

“No.”

“When did you know definitively that they were having an affair?”

“I went to the bar one night while they were both closing up.” Stephanie wiped tears from her cheeks, drew a long breath that came out shuddering. “I saw her get into his car. She should have left before him, but the two of them left together. He must have driven her home. He got back to his dad’s place an hour later. I was sleeping over, in his bedroom. He said they’d had a customer stay late.”

Val Gratteur eased a long stream of smoke through her lips. She tapped the end of the cigarette into a petri dish she’d taken from a refrigerator and folded her arms, eyes wandering over the girl in the chair.

“I was so embarrassed.” Stephanie’s voice rose high as the sadness crashed over her again. The humiliation seemed to be the hardest part. “I didn’t even tell anyone. Not Andrew. Not his dad. I just didn’t say anything. I pretended. Maybe I thought if I kept pretending, it…”

“It wouldn’t be real,” I finished for her.

She hung her head in her hands.

“I went there again,” Stephanie said. Her voice had lost all emotion now. It was cold and worn, a beaten thing. “That night. Tuesday night. I saw them together. They were laughing and singing as they packed up the bar. He grabbed her around the waist. They kissed.”

Val and I waited. Stephanie didn’t speak.

“Where did you get the gun?” I asked. “Where is it now?”

Stephanie struggled. She looked around her as though awakened from a dream, eyes wide.

“Maybe it was Andrew’s?” Val offered. “His dad’s?”

“Try not to suggest any information.” I raised a hand. “She’s got to give us these details herself.”

There was a growing unease in my stomach, something about Stephanie’s wandering glance, her restless hands. She looked distressed. Uncertain. Now and then I could see the anger crossing her face like clouds drifting across the moon, darkening everything, making her still. The tears were still rolling down her cheeks. She swiped at them too hard, stretched her skin as she did, a girl who’d known very little comfort in a long, long time.