I said, “Where’s your husband?”

She cocked her head at me, curious but not necessarily upset by the question. She didn’t answer, though.

I was still panting. I said, “What are you doing out here?”

“I’m about to go for a run,” she said. She gazed at me for a moment, then said, “What are you doing out here?”

I coughed, and it seemed to rattle something loose inside me; it set free something mean and stupid. I still can’t explain precisely what drove me to say what I said. “He came up to me on the beach yesterday and talked to me. My mom had to chase him away.”

The blond woman’s whole pretty face changed in one instant. Her eyes darkened and her brow closed in. Her chin seemed to grow. She stared straight at my face and didn’t speak or blink.

I waited for her to react. To call me a liar. Or to beg me to tell her the details of my interaction with her husband—maybe she would say, I knew it! Maybe she would weep and confess to me that she knew he had tried to pursue me. But she still didn’t speak, only looked at me with a face that was hard and sad and confused.

I said, “He told me to come meet him here at night.”

22

WHEN THE GIRL said this, Roxie’s brain went black. Something went screaming through her entire body as fast and fiery as a rocket launch. Her heart froze in an instant.

She lunged at the girl, driven by the sense that this was not real, none of it. Not the moon or the ocean or the girl in the yellow pajamas, not the things the girl was saying about Keats, or the possibility that Keats might find himself in the position of needing to defend himself again—none of it was real to Roxie in that moment, and she knew that it was not real because the moon was too low and strange and bright. This entire scenario was not real, and therefore, for her next actions, there could be no consequences. This was just a dream that needed to end.

Her first impulse was not to kill the girl but simply to silence her.

But once the girl was thrashing under the water, Roxie knew she had to go the whole way. The moment she forced the girl’s face down into the surf was the moment that she sealed her fate. Allowing the girl to live after assaulting her would have ended Roxie. And so the girl had to die.

Because, of course, if the girl lived to tell her story, the police would believe it. Keats was, after all, on the registry. They would believe every single one of the girl’s lies—from Keats approaching her on the beach, to Keats instructing her to meet him there in the middle of the night, to Roxie lunging at her out of jealousy, or whatever twisted psychosis the girl might dream up to explain it. They were monsters, Keats and Roxie, at least that’s what the police and the girl’s parents and the community would believe. Their lives would be over, while the girl would be given years of counseling for her trauma and would be applauded for her bravery in exposing the monsters, for escaping their trap, and providing all the information the prosecution would need to make sure Keats and Roxie would never see the light of day, or each other, again.