“What’s this about?” I said.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he said. “Danielle Reeves is dead.”

“What?” I said.

“Danielle is dead,” the detective repeated.

“Dead?”

“She was murdered,” he said, watching me carefully. “Let’s sit down.”

We went to the living room and I sat on the couch. He took the chair by the window. A watery spill of streetlight outlined his face.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Yes.”

“That’s crazy. I just spoke to her.”

“When was that?”

“Two days ago. Sunday evening. We met for a drink.”

“And yesterday?” he said.

“Yesterday, no, I didn’t see her. I haven’t talked to her since Sunday.”

“Where were you last night?”

“Here. It was raining. I didn’t go out.”

“Can anybody confirm that?”

I shook my head. He wrote in a notebook. I became aware of the shattering rain on the cars outside. I felt for a cigarette in the pocket of my raincoat. Water dripped from it and soaked the upholstery. I always took off my raincoat and hung it on the hook by the door. Why hadn’t that happened? My mind rushed, confused, like the current in the gutter—I couldn’t get hold of a thought.

I lit the cigarette, took a drag. The smoke hovered around my head, weighed down by humidity.

Ash said, “Danielle’s mother tells me you and Danielle are old friends.”

I tried to speak but my throat constricted, and I began sobbing. I observed myself, curious and dismayed. I didn’t even understand the situation, yet here I was crying in front of a stranger. None of it made sense. My cigarette fell from my hands. The detective picked it up and stubbed it in the ashtray on the windowsill. A part of my brain thought of how I must look: no makeup, snot, the terrible sounds coming from my throat. I grew more and more embarrassed, which made it harder to compose myself. It took a while before I could breathe normally.

The detective stared at me like you would a sculpture, without caring what it thought. What he was saying about Danielle, it couldn’t be real. It didn’t make sense. She had already survived all the drugs and prison. She was finally doing okay.

“She can’t be dead,” I said.

“She is, Ms. Ford.”

“Not murdered. It’s ridiculous. If she was going to die it would’ve happened before.”

“What do you mean?” the detective said.

“Forget it,” I said.

He wrote in his notebook again and spoke. “Tell me about the night you saw Danielle.”

“We met for a drink.”

“Was that a regular thing?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “We sort of lost touch.”

“When?”

I looked away, said nothing. It was a few years back, in the middle of the drugs and her arrest, but I was not about to talk about that with this guy.

“When she went to prison?” he asked.

I hated that he knew that about her. I saw her from his perspective—a stripper, a drug addict, a felon. I could see the judgment in his eyes, the dismissal.