“It’s true, what they’re accusing me of. It’s true.”

Heloise had laughed, an angry, hysterical laugh. “No, there’s no way it’s true! What the hell are you talking about?”

“Yes, I’m sick. It’s a sickness. I … Oh, God, help me!”

That was when it happened.

That was the instant when life as Heloise had known it changed. She had felt like an astronaut who had been tethered and was now floating free in space—rotating, groggy, doomed—as she drifted farther and farther away from Earth.

Wait, come back, help me!

She hadn’t said anything while he spoke. He had explained himself, made excuses, opened up a secret drawer from his life and shown her the vile, disgusting contents that she wished she had never seen.

“I never touched them. I promise you that, Heloise. But I wanted to—oh, I’m ashamed to say that—I wanted to, and I’ve looked at them. I’ve watched while other people … I’ve been there and I’ve watched while they … I didn’t do anything to stop it, but I never touched them myself. I swear it.”

She had woken up with a start in the middle of that phone call, with her pulse racing along with her thoughts, as if waking up from the middle of a dream in which she was falling.

“Stop,” she had said. “Stop! I don’t want to hear anymore.”

“But, Heloise, you have to understand that—”

“No, I don’t want to hear anymore. I don’t want to talk to you.”

He had cried even harder, and Heloise had never felt so alone. It was more than just loneliness. It was the feeling that she didn’t belong anywhere. Her mother was dead, and her father—the man she had known and loved more than anyone else in her whole life—no longer existed.

She felt like an orphan.

Lost.

“You’re dead to me,” she had told him before hanging up. “You’ll never see me again.”

CHAPTER

39

SCHÄFER PRESSED THE apartment building’s door intercom button with his chapped thumb and held it in until the whole building vibrated as if someone were jackhammering the sidewalk out in front of the building.

He didn’t let go until a window up on the fourth floor was flung open and a man with curly bedhead stuck his head out and glared angrily down at the street below. When he spotted Schäfer and Augustin by the building’s front door, he yelled in a hoarse voice, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Kaldan, fifth floor,” Schäfer yelled back. “We need to speak to her. Have you seen her?”

“No, and unless she’s deaf, I’m going to go out on a limb and conclude that she’s not home, you idiot!” The man loudly slammed his window shut.