“I asked him to come over, I wanted to make sure he would still come over, after the, the party—” Ellen’s shower curtain wasn’t as opaque as I would have wanted, and it was decorated by gold and pink glitter swirls and a cupcake print, complete with cherry on top. In the top corner, gold foil spelled out Good Vibes Only! I yanked the curtain off the rod and brought it back to the living room, where Ellen was still talking.

“—and it was like, like everything was fine, you know? At least for a little while. He brought champagne. And flowers.”

With my arms still full of Klein’s pastel makeshift burial shroud, my eyes found the big spray of birds-of-paradise in a cut-crystal vase on Ellen’s mantel, which made me think of the duvet at the St. Leo. I wondered if Klein, too, had thought of the acrylic bedspread when he bought them, if that’s what had triggered thoughts of Ellen. His last living joke. I remembered a thing I’d heard once: birds-of-paradise are the goriest flower to kill. Decapitate them, and you have to deal with thick gray-green sap all over your hands, your clothes, the kind that never washes off. Birds-of-paradise bleed like any living thing.

“We made . . . love. But then he started choking me, you know, during, and he’s never . . . That was new, you know? I tried to play along, act like I was fine with it, like it turned me on even—” I caught Ellen’s shudder at that one. She was starting to repeat herself, verbatim. She’d practiced her speech before I got there, I realized. More than once.

“Oh my God,” she said, starting to hyperventilate. For the first time since I’d stepped into the apartment, I caught her looking at the body, really looking at Klein. Her mouth dropped open—maybe to start screaming—and her body rocked as she suppressed a gag.

I crossed the room in three strides and took her by the shoulders. I gripped her in a rough hug, pressing her face into my collarbone until I was sure she wouldn’t make a sound.

I was stroking her hair without even realizing it and murmuring soothing sounds into her ear, like you would with any frightened animal. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said over and over, the words like glass in my throat. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”

I needed her to keep it together. There was no way I could get Klein’s body out of the apartment by myself. It wasn’t going to be okay, for me or for Ellen or for Klein, but I needed her cooperation for what I knew would come next.

On the drive over, before I’d been sure that Klein was dead, I’d thought of all the worst-case scenarios, my next possible play.