A tear escaped her eye and rolled down her cheek. Lost in thought, she let it linger there before wiping it away. “I guess we probably are all gonna need some serious therapy.”

I thought of poor Ms. Hernández back in Tampa, and her attempts to get me to spill my guts. “Or something,” I agreed, pretty sure that therapy wasn’t going to be the answer to any of our future problems. “You just said you’re relieved that this is over. Is it?” I asked. “Over?”

Violet nodded. “I think so.” She reached for me and rested her hand on my arm. “You’re normal again, at least. It’s off you.”

Five days later, on Saturday, Trey and I walked the long distance across town to the abandoned house that had belonged to his grandparents before he was born. It was the house in which his mom and her sister had been raised, where Mary Jane Svensson had dreamed about her life beyond the limits of Willow, Wisconsin, before venturing off to college and crossing paths with Michael Simmons. It was located, ironically, on the road that ran alongside the rural highway that headed south, toward Chicago—almost as if Trey’s mom had literally been born on the path leading to her destiny.

“When did your mom’s family move away from here?” I asked as we came to a stop in front of the one-story house on Frontage Road. It was almost impossible to see it from the street due to the overgrown grass and shrubs out front.

“My grandparents died in car crash when I was a baby, and the house has just sat here, empty, since my mom’s younger sister moved to Ohio,” Trey said. The bruises on his face from Northern had faded into a barely visible shade of yellow, and he looked like he’d gained weight during the last few days while he’d been living back at home with his parents. “I think my mom tried to sell it, but it was already in pretty bad shape, and she didn’t want to put in the time or energy to repair things that would have increased its value. We used to come here on weekends when I was a kid to try to keep up with the yard work and scrub off the graffiti, but eventually it just got to be too much work. This isn’t a place that held a lot of happy memories for my mom, anyway.”

Between us, we’d lugged a shovel, gardening shears, and thick gardening gloves all the way over from his garage on Martha Road. Mom and I were still staying in a motel in Ortonville, and I was due to fly back to Tampa the next morning. I had spent two days at St. Matthew’s Hospital after the day of violence at the Simmons house, unknowingly having suffered a condition referred to as “suspension trauma” after hanging off the roof for so long. My doctor had been amazed that I’d remained conscious for as long as I had after Trey had pulled me back up to safety; they’d explained I had passed out in Violet’s bedroom because the oxygen level in my blood had been dangerously low.