Then she told me, “I think it’s time to open that box now.” It still sat under the dining room table, where we’d left it when we carried it in. Now we brought it into the bedroom and sat it between us on the bed. Carefully, I began to take out the contents, one envelope and file folder at a time.

Julie asked, “Do we have to make a list so we put them back in order?”

“These are just copies,” I said. “I don’t have to give them back.”

One of the padded envelopes was marked CLIP. Expecting a file of newspaper articles, I ran my nail under the seal. A small plastic bag fell out onto the quilt. Inside was a single blond curl, one of its strands darkened, as if with a messy dye. It landed between us, a grim artifact. The label on the bag read, B. McCormack. Like one of my Victorian ladies of fiction, I clutched my throat.

“Julie, wait,” I said. “That’s real.”

She said nothing. When I looked up, I could see she was crying. She reached out and took my hand. I wanted to punch Pete Sunday. What was he thinking? Was he that sloppy, to include real evidence in a box of copies? Quickly, I opened another envelope.

These were photos. They were of the crime scene in color, both lurid and washed out. At first, I couldn’t determine what exactly I was seeing...a close-up of something that looked matted...

I told Julie, “We shouldn’t be seeing these. He must have given me the wrong box. I was just supposed to have copies. Documents. Police reports. Not all this.”

Julie was up then and running to the bathroom, retching into her hands. I followed her, holding her hair back as she threw up in the green marble toilet. I sat on the edge of the beautiful tub, also green, with satin-nickel finish. The soothing luxury of the setting, the low caramel lights, the spatter of fairy-tale snow against the narrow floor-to-ceiling bathroom windows, all in sharp contrast to the violent contents of the box. “We don’t have to look any more,” I told Julie. “The detective must have made a mistake. He would not have done this on purpose.”

“We should go through everything while we are together,” Julie said. “You don’t want to have to do it some other time alone.”

“I don’t have to do it at all,” I said. “There’s not going to be anything in this box that will tell me anything I don’t really know.”