Now that I was here, now that I was seeing it, smelling it, the blood on the dusty warehouse floor, I’d had enough. A moment was all it took. Only minutes earlier I’d felt the certain and crushing desire to beat Kevin Driscoll to death with my bare hands, a magnetic pull toward his house promising me how good and natural it would feel to kill him. A perfect crime. But now that he was before me, bound and bloodied, that hot fury was nowhere to be seen. I was empty, shivering.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s over now. This has to stop.”

Sharon sniggered. Khalid’s smile was thin, the cheerless leer of a snake.

“We can’t do this. I’m calling the police now.” I took my phone from my pocket. No sooner had it met the air than Linda had it from me, and was pushing the power button, switching it off, sliding it inside his coat.

“Is there anythin’ you want to say to him?” Khalid asked, gesturing to the beaten man in the chair. “You don’t have very much time left.”

Kevin was watching me. Of course I had things to say. I’d said them in those nighttime fantasies as I beat him, long, streaming descriptions of everything he had taken from me. But now as I tried to speak, my throat tightened, strangling the words. How could I say anything? How could I put what this man had done into words? Kevin was watching me, waiting for me to tell him about my pain. I’d glimpsed him at the back of the Lord Chesterton with all the strangers who had come to hear me, wanting me to lay it all out, every wound, every embarrassment, every longing ache. Kevin and I watched each other. He knew. I could see it in his eyes. He knew what he had done to me, and he wasn’t sorry. He had the look of a man surveying his creation. The master of ceremonies. Because, in the end, we were all here on this bloodied, darkened stage because of him. We were all his puppets. Well, it would stop now. I was not going to spout the lines he had written for me. I was not going to let him die in the final act and cement this cruel life, this nightmare he’d created for me.

“No,” I said. “I don’t have anything to say to him.”

Dale was trembling with rage. He strode forward, mechanically, at Khalid’s glance and took a pistol from his hand.

“But this can’t—” I said. I looked at Linda and Sharon for help. “This can’t go on.”

“Ted, this is all outside your control.” Khalid put a hand up, calm. “You may not be happy about this right now, but it’s happening. This. Is. Happening. It’s going to be good for you in the future, when you think back on it. Just trust me, bro.”