As their airways constrict, as each pull of breath grows ragged and reluctant, their faces are sketched with panic, the dusty tapestries of their histories unfurling as the darkness takes hold. Their flavorings are persistence and regret.

I am telling you this now because I still possess the faintest of hopes that somewhere you can hear me as I hear the police sirens lacerating the silence. The sound makes my teeth itch, like a blade being honed on a steel.

As the reckoning approaches, I suppose there is a need to unburden myself, to seek absolution for the sins I have committed. I am not sorry for what I have done. The remorse I feel is not for the lives I have taken, but for what each act of murder has cost me.

The power to take a life is a gift not many possess. I have always understood this. I do not have many talents and I am grateful for it.

But the world is not so forgiving.

Some will call me a monster, deserving of a death sentence myself. It is fair, I suppose. But I am not a monster. I have never been a monster.

I am a keeper of secrets.

And I am not alone.

The greengrocer’s boy stuffing shiny apples into paper bags and pound coins into his pockets; the piano teacher who makes house calls, sneaking glimpses at his pupils’ bare knees; the exhausted mother who fantasizes about shoving the pram she is pushing into oncoming traffic; the families who move in—and out of—The Avenue, as ceaseless as time.

We all hide secrets, dark and ugly.

You.

Me.

And every one of us on this dirt-filled earth.

This is the last time I will feel the sun on my face or hear the greetings of the blackbirds or inhale the scent of damask roses. Perhaps I deserve to spend the rest of my days in a cage, condemned to a life without freedom, as I have condemned others. Hush, now. Listen. Can you hear, as I do, the thunder of the funeral drums?

The police are almost upon me.

And so I’ll begin. Because the time has come to finish it. Because the only way to start this story is at its end.

2

Sunday 29th July 2018, 3:31 P.M.

The Avenue

The moving van packed with the furniture and hopes of the Lockwood family brushed against the rhododendron bushes that surrounded The Avenue, breaking off one of the blooms.

That flower floated to the pavement, petals torn and mangled. The van driver, intent on finding the right house, did not notice the damage he had caused. Neither did the Lockwoods.

But as heat trembled in the air around them, this family had no idea of how they would come to pray that 25 The Avenue had remained a blurry photograph on the real estate agent’s website, and no idea that by the end of the summer, their lives would be as scarred as the stem bleeding sap onto the concrete.