Audrey wore a simple shift that hung loosely, showing her body through the sheer fabric. Her slender back and bare feet and the way she moved, deliberately, with her eyes open wide, didn’t mesh with Danielle’s bratty cartoon appeal. The two women kissed, turning for the camera. Audrey sat on a bench and Danielle knelt over her, pushing her thigh between Audrey’s legs.

How could her death exist in the same world as this tacky video? It was impossible, nonsensical. I wept and kept watching. Audrey reached to touch Danielle’s face. They smiled at each other, genuine. I felt a vibration in my sinuses and deep in my joints, an inaudible singing, like missing every place I’d ever been—every room, every park, every street I’d driven down in my whole life. I longed for them all at once, astonished at the pain, the inability to access the past. Usually I never knew what to want. Now suddenly I wanted everything. The world rushed from me, like each moment of the wanting had already ended by the time I perceived it. I was helpless to make it stay.

A man entered the frame and the girls turned to him. He was one of the ones I met. Kenneth, maybe? I couldn’t remember his name. One of the other guys came in and I watched the rest absentmindedly, a series of acrobatic permutations among the four of them.

I thought of the photos of Danielle’s body. Someone had beaten her until she stopped moving, and kept hitting her until her head caved in. I pressed my hands to my face, felt the hardness of my own skull. I couldn’t fathom the passion, the energy it would take to break a person’s head. What had Danielle done to make someone that crazy? She and Brandon had fought, but I believed his story. I couldn’t see him following her to the motel. It really bothered me that Sally hadn’t told me about the land. Or about seeing Danielle. She could have mentioned it. There was no reason not to.

I decided to talk to Sally again. Something weird was going on and I had a bad feeling that I was in the middle of it. The day was hot and breezy. I took my bike out. I rode on the sidewalk, wound through patched parking lots and bayou trails and walled streets lined with maples, the tops of townhomes visible beyond them. In River Oaks the streets were shaded by live oaks whose branches formed a canopy above the road. The neighborhood felt a couple of degrees cooler than the rest of the city. How did they do that? Were they air-conditioning the outside?

I rounded the corner of Sally’s block and stopped in front of her house, watching the Mexican workers mowing the neighbor’s grass and carrying bags of mulch from their trucks. I walked my bike up Sally’s drive and through the gate, past the outdoor room where we’d sat the other night. The pool threw off shards of light. A few leaves floated near the tiled sides, and a leggy begonia in a pot drooped, touching the water. Red caladiums rustled under a drake elm, and large pots filled with bamboo lined the side of the yard. A couple of spindly lemon trees shed sparse leaves onto the mulch below. A voice startled me.