When she heard her name, she was so startled that she flung her hand and knocked a glass off the counter. With her head cradling the phone to her shoulder, she turned on the lights and took the broom from the closet.

“Good evening, this is Officer Macavinta of the NYPD.”

She expected Officer Macavinta to say Leda’s name, but Sarah kept hearing her own name instead.

She heard a list of items that all belonged to her.

“And no phone?” she confirmed. She had to turn it into a question, as if asking might change the answer. “Got it. I’m coming.” But after hanging up, she just stood there—broom in hand—looking at the glittering floor.

Long before three nights ago, when they’d filed the report, they’d been familiar with their precinct. Before Leda was arrested for possession of marijuana and heroin as a high school senior, she’d been given a warning as a sophomore for smoking pot, basically right in front of the precinct, with two friends. Such an event now seemed quaint. Starting in sixth grade, she’d gone to a well-regarded private school, famous for not giving grades and valuing the arts at least as highly as mathematics. The two friends had also gone to this school, had done the same escalating drugs right along with Leda on the same timeline, but one was currently getting a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at Cornell, and the other was the front man of a band whose second album had recently been reviewed in The New Yorker. According to several profiles, this musician friend (who’d loved Sarah’s tuna, lemon, and basil pasta and always forgot his hat, his keys, and his homework folders at their house) was living outside Nashville on a modest farm with a lovely looking girlfriend and hadn’t used drugs since his “messed-up teenaged years.”

How had these friends moved past those years unscathed? How were they healthy and successful while Leda had done little since that arrest aside from suffer?

It had occurred to Sarah that Leda was no longer suffering, and that maybe she had the ability to discard whatever didn’t serve her, and in this case what didn’t serve her was her parents. You mean, Matthew asked, when Sarah had mentioned this idea, like a sociopath?