Her father offers to call Ricky with the news, which pleases Cate to no end—Ricky having to find out secondhand. When she calls an hour later, Cate lies to her, on principle. “I was just about to call.”

At first Ricky seems properly empathic, but then she quickly segues into fatuously confusing the fire extinguisher with a Crock-Pot. The perpetrators she categorizes as hoboes. Assembling a version that’s slightly cartoonish.

“Well, I didn’t get a choice, really,” Cate says. “I didn’t get to pick light saber and Armani underwear model for my weapon and victim.” She’s pretty much done with the conversation at this point. Her most immediate preoccupation is how sick to her stomach she is from the antiretroviral meds, another crummy aspect of the whole thing she doesn’t want to present to her mother.

“How’s Neale?”

“Banged up. Her cheekbone is fractured. She’s going to have to have surgery. Her wrist is sprained. I’m not sure exactly how that happened.”

“Did he—?”

Ricky’s slightly gossipy inflection further softens with a velvety tone of concern that makes Cate decide she doesn’t have to answer this essential question.

“And of course the whole thing will now be distorted into heartwarming. Like you’re the crossing guard who saved some kid from a hurtling truck. And now you’re taking him to Disneyland because that’s always been his secret wish.”

Cate waits, hoping Ricky will dial this down a little, but she doesn’t.

“And it’s a shame they brought your hand into the story. Here. Wait a minute.” Cate sits through the giant crackle of a newspaper opening and folding. “ ‘In spite of her disability—’ ”

Cate presses the red hang-up icon. Later, she’ll say the call got dropped and she really should change networks.

A few days later, after the nameless guy has died and Cate is officially a killer, another local TV station asks if she’d be up to doing a news feature on home invasion, “a sort of DIY piece,” what someone can improvise when their home is invaded. This is put to Cate with a feminist cast, and she’s persuaded her story might be of help to other women. How it turns out, though, is her sitting on one of two low sofas, around a coffee table, with two morning show hosts and another guest, a guy who sets a bear trap by his back door every night before he goes to bed and how this paid off big-time when a couple of robbers jimmied the door open one night. He sits with the bear trap in his lap throughout the segment.

“That’s it,” she tells Neale. “I’m getting off the parade float. If other people want to murder their intruders, they can find their own crappy weapons.”