I check my watch. It’s 10:15. A month ago, Jay was going about his day, planning parties, and refusing to clean his room, with no idea that he had less than a week to live. And here I am with time to kill.

The day stretches before me like a serpent, endless and threatening with its stillness, yawning in the sun. Going back to my parents’ house is out of the question. The thought of spending the afternoon alone with my father and his books makes my stomach clench. He’ll either want to know why I’m not at work or why I’ve been yelling in my sleep at night.

I’m still sitting in the station lot with the keys in the ignition, when I chance a look at myself in the rearview mirror. The face staring back at me is grim: dark stubbly hair from the crown of my head down to my left ear and brownish-pink scabs like oblong birthmarks stretching across my cheek and chin.

Fuck this, I think. They might be willing to brush the case aside, but there’s someone out there who’s responsible for Jay’s death, and I’m going to retrace my steps—from visiting my mother’s office that Tuesday morning to running down Lumpkin—and figure out what I missed.

Coffee in hand, I twist past the students sitting on the stone steps in front of the university’s arches. The scarlet oak’s turned silver since the last time I saw it and is drowning in a sea of burnt-orange leaves. A student dozes on the ramp to New College. He’s tucked his knees up to his chin and must be freezing. The day’s much colder than the morning Jay was hit. But the tingling’s gone—that sense that something was wrong; I don’t feel it at all.

I pass the library without reading its motto and enter Joe Brown with only a cursory glance at the staircase to nowhere.

When I slip into my mother’s office, she holds up a finger and keeps typing.

In the hall, there’s the sound of singing—a woman’s voice, rich and warm, as she greets students. My mother smiles, and I know before I see her that it’s Amina Adebe, professor of psychology and women’s studies, who’s known me since I was in diapers and possesses a fondness for brightly colored dresses and dashikis. The rest of the faculty shuffle back and forth from classrooms to offices in a sea of gray, brown, and black. Not Amina. Today it’s a red dress with yellow butterflies.