I went to her and held her. It seemed the only real option when I realized Val wasn’t going to. Val had probably realized long ago that hugging the families of her victims wasn’t worth the emotional toll it would take on her later as she lay awake at night, remembering their shoulders shuddering in her arms, the intimate feel of their gasping breath on her skin. They tell you not to hug victims in your initial training in the police. When you hug you cross the professional barrier, the one that’s supposed to keep you safe from the horrors of your job.

“Are you sure you need to do this?” I asked. “There are other ways you can say goodbye to Andrew.”

“He’s not going to look how you’re used to him looking,” Val said. “It might affect your memory of him when he was alive.”

“I want to see,” Stephanie said, drawing away from me. She let a few sobs escape her thin lips, pushed back a lock of sweaty hair. She was not taking care of herself, this girl, and that worried me. There had been no one supporting her at the crime scene except Michael Bell, and no sign that her parents were going to come from interstate to help her get through her loss. Here she was again, alone. I knew Sweeney had put two officers on Stephanie, but she’d likely not insisted it be twenty-four hours a day or involve more than parking in the street outside her house while she was inside.

Val pulled the sheet back to Andrew’s waist. Stephanie looked for a few seconds then turned and shoved her face into my chest.

“It’s okay,” I lied. I waved at Val and she covered the body again. “This is … This is all going to…”

What was there to say? This was all going to be over soon? This was all going to go away? Neither of those things was true. I was hardly focusing on the girl crying in my arms, trying to think back to when I was fifteen. My mother had died of breast cancer. There hadn’t been much to say then, either. Lots of uncomfortable looks. People turning away from me at school, going to play with other kids, leaving me with my weird, incomprehensible grief. I hadn’t even cried at first. It seemed impossible to accept, her being gone, for either my dad or me. We’d avoided each other for weeks afterward, neither of us wanting to be the one to break the standoff. I was so lost in these thoughts when Stephanie spoke that I hardly heard what she said.

“I did it,” Stephanie cried. I rubbed her back, my hand thumping up and down over pointy bones.

“You didn’t do anything. This was a horrible, horrible thing. It doesn’t matter that—”