Detective Ward pushes a tissue box toward me with one end of her pen, examining me closely.

“Elise was still on the balcony and then she came inside and saw him. It was dark, so dark, and—and—” I can’t go on, the pain in my chest too much to bear. Elise needs you, my mind whispers. Somehow I dig deeper, draw on the last of my strength. “We couldn’t see each other. I only knew it was Elise because it couldn’t be anyone else. Jack was in front of me. I don’t think she even saw me. She—” I am sobbing into my hands, drowning in my own tears. “Elise was scared. She shot him.”

She hadn’t meant to. It was dark, she couldn’t have seen who it was. If I close my eyes, I can imagine it all unfolding. Elise must’ve been so terrified. I can imagine being in her shoes, re-entering the kitchen from the balcony. The house is quiet, too quiet. I’m on edge from the night before. Then I look up and someone’s walking toward me in the dark.

Her fear is so palpable, it burns through me. I can see her reaching for the gun almost by instinct. And then—

It’s too painful. I can’t.

Detective Ward waits for me to stop crying. It feels like years before I’m able to compose myself. She leans forward again, elbows on the table, hands clasped.

“That’s interesting,” she says slowly, every syllable enunciated. “Because I spoke to her last night and she says you weren’t there.”

“What?” Vera and I say at the same time. Vera turns and looks at me sharply, a message: Don’t say a word.

“One of you is lying,” Detective Ward says. “And what I want to know is why.”

SATURDAY // DECEMBER 31 // DAY 113

20.

Elise loved action movies, especially the ones with heroes, superpowered or otherwise. Stories with a good guy and a bad guy. People on a mission to right wrongs. People so driven by their pursuit of justice that they have to step outside of the law on occasion to deliver it.

She loved big showdowns between hero and villain. Even though the endings were always the same—good defeats evil—she always seemed on the edge of her seat like she was worried the heroes wouldn’t prevail.

Her favorite was Kill Bill. Uma Thurman stars as the hero who kills her way down a list of assassins who’d walked into a little chapel and shot up her wedding rehearsal, putting her in a coma. These assassins were supposed to be her friends, her family—she was one of them, or at least she had been. So once she wakes from her coma years later, she exacts her revenge.

The first time we watched it together, we were in my basement celebrating the New Year with a bottle of wine pilfered from my parents’ cellar, reveling in having the whole house to ourselves.

“It’s my favorite movie,” Elise told me. “Of all time.”