I flew home and slept for days. At first the dreams were unbearable. Or they weren’t exactly dreams—in the deepest pit of sleep, there was nothing—more like memories that, when I’d briefly rouse to roll over or shoot awake at a car horn’s blast, would surface in weird combinations. I’d see wildfire sweeping through Manhattan, the German shepherd gnawing its legs, Lane in a hole, blindfolded.

I found a very old stash of pot in my medicine cabinet. It was dry and harsh, and my lungs were already wrecked, but it helped subdue the dreams. Stoned in bed, I’d focus on a kind of humming green at the back of my mind and sleep through the morning. Then I’d take a long shower and order something in.

My first piece of business—I was technically still on leave—was to send a package to Lane’s mother. I spent an absurd afternoon printing off copies of my work from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and arbitrarily underlining sections in red and blue, adding the occasional question mark, exclamation point, and coffee stain for verisimilitude, just like I’d done when fabricating notes. I’d only chosen articles that hadn’t made it into Lane’s original dossier, like my piece about the igloo, and by the end of the process it almost felt like it could make a decent book after all.

When I ventured out to courier the package, I finally registered that the scaffolding was gone. The restoration was complete. As promised, they’d painted the building. It was only a matter of time before the neighboring buildings matched it, and the new aesthetic would spread.

I stood outside in the early September air, unsettled by the paint job. They’d slathered the white so thick, you could hardly tell the facade was brick. I put a hand to it, as if communing with the building trapped within, and the paint was smooth and cool, like plastic.

2.

I started work on the story. As I sketched my outline, I kept tripping over what Dr. Kriss had told Rainer in the outbuilding: She won’t tell anyone, she’s mute. I didn’t understand, but I sensed that’s why she didn’t have Rainer kill me on the spot, why she’d given me a chance to get off the mountain. In moments of self-doubt, I thought she knew: I was like her, a fabricator—two women given over to the creep. A liar couldn’t tell the story of a liar.