It was when I was making my way back heavy-laden to the patio that I noticed something: Footprints in the mud around the rosebushes Stefan had replanted were just a few feet from the back door. It had rained a few nights before, washing the snow nearest the house to mud. Then the mud had frozen. So that meant...night before last or the night before that, someone stood there, yet again, facing the windows to our family room, forty inches of air and an eighth of an inch of glass from our vulnerable lives. The shoe prints were running shoes, but with a different pattern from the Nike Air Max I wore when I took walks. How did I know the pattern on the bottom of my running shoes? I knew because I often used a garden tool to dig the dirt and gravel out of them before I put them in the washing machine. And these prints were not my size. I set my foot heel-to-heel within one print. They were noticeably larger, by perhaps almost half an inch.

Fifteen minutes later, Esme called me. It would later seem like something that would happen on TV, my struggling to extract my phone from my pocket, spilling all the tomatoes onto the patio flagstones, where they lay seeping like small organs. Was she out there, watching me? Or did only the hoodie figure do that? Was privacy the most ridiculous of illusions? She said softly, and to me chillingly, “I still remember the sounds. Stuff hitting the walls. Yelling. I should tell you. I have to get it over with.”

“And so you should. You have to get this off your chest. We should really meet, now, before you go away.”

“I’ve waited too long,” she said.

“Tell me more,” I said, and listened to her breathing. “Tell me the rest.”

Silence. Breathing. Then not even that.

I was the one who finally disconnected. Then I stood with my hand on the phone receiver. Did I understand just what I was asking for? If Esme was indeed as sick as I believed that she must be, was she the one drawing me close, then pushing me away, in a game intended to entice me to throw away caution, to come to her, on her terms?

Was it not really Stefan she wanted to hurt, but instead me, to punish Stefan by taking away yet another person he loved?

Of course, if she and I did meet, there would be police at the ready, but would they be close enough and quick enough to save me? Dire things happened in seconds. They happened every day.

14

I finally spoke with Pete Sunday and we met at a local coffee shop.