“This is something you have not heard me say so very many times in my life,” my mother said. “And here it is. I was wrong.” She stopped for a moment. “I was wrong about Stefan coming back home. Father Kanelos sings out his name in church. All my daughters’ friends praise him for his hard work and his kindness. For the wrong he did, I will always cry, as he will cry, the angels cry. But I am proud of my grandson. I am proud of the man he is becoming.”

She could not have given Stefan a better present.

I forced myself to do the things that ordinary people without morbid obsessions did. One of those things was forcing myself to put in some hours every day on my book. To my surprise, the book, which really amounted to a knitted-together series of my class lectures, was nearing the home stretch. My thesis was that in life and in fiction, women who’d lost someone—a child, a husband, a sibling, a love—felt incomplete, in ways men in similar straits did not, and were therefore vulnerable to desperate and even doomed adventures. Whether raving or retiring, desperate women make for a dramatic narrative and soon, their familiar stories captivated me all over again. Only two chapters remained unfinished, then I would give the whole thing a polish and it would be ready long before the summer deadline.

Inevitably, I thought of Esme, recently silent. What if I was wrong about her? Well, I thought, things would then be no worse than they already were. We would go on. I knew that I would always be drawn back and back and back to the night Belinda died. Whatever we knew, we could never know enough, we could never forget enough. What if Pete Sunday never found Esme? What if Stefan remained in danger, our never knowing its source? Back then, I wished for safety; he wished for peace. Neither of us knew then that we were wishing for the wrong thing, and I could include Esme in that too. By the time Esme next reached out to me, her fate had already begun to overtake her. One day, there Esme was, her text jumping up on my phone screen, again with the strange familiarity, as if we’d just spoken an hour before.

How is Stefan? Is he okay?

I replied, He’s fine. Very busy.

Good. As long as he never tells!

I think we should get together, I replied. And then she was gone. Infuriated, I called Pete Sunday and gave him the latest in Esme’s string of phone numbers.

When I saw Stefan later that night, I said, “That girl. That girl who texts me. Esme. If she ever contacts you, tell me. The police think she might be part of this harassment thing. I think she’s just barking at the moon. But let’s be safe anyhow.”