I make myself a pot of coffee and sit at the kitchen table. My eyes close, and I draw up Lumpkin Street. Walking through North Campus, clutching a coffee cup in my hand, taking the cut-through path by the Founders Garden—the smell of cedar, dead leaves, and late-autumn flowers wafting over the garden wall. Sliding through the side entrance of Joe Brown. A glance at the staircase to nowhere. My mother’s appraising gaze. The echoes of a scream and then sprinting down Lumpkin—I must have run right past the driver, but everything around me—pale sidewalk beneath my feet, the student I sidestepped, colliding with the brick wall, my fingers skimming rough mortar, a bike waiting to turn at the light—is a blur. There’s a car speeding past, I’m sure of it, but when I try to bring it into focus, it refuses to take shape. I’m looking down the street, not across, so determined to get to the center of the action, to be in the middle of it all, that the car’s only in my peripheral. And then there’s a metal railing, trees blocking a clear view until I close in on the intersection and see the students gathered, and Jay Kemp is lying in the road, already dead.

I’m awoken by a hammering outside. The roofers, I think, blotting a smudge of drool on the table with my fingers, but the sound is much closer.

I stand and roll my neck, thinking longingly of the bed upstairs, but the hammering has turned into knocking, and I realize there’s no one to make it stop but me.

Through the windows that frame the entryway, I see a swoop of brown hair and the last person I would expect after everything that happened in the past twenty-four hours.

“Oliver?” I open the door.

He looks small and disheveled standing there between the brick arches, and I wonder what Truman said to him after I left.

“You need to come back to the station.”

“Yeah.” I rub a knot in my shoulder. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I glance behind me at the kitchen, the coffee that’s spilled on the floor, and wonder if there’s a crease of the table’s edge running across my forehead. “Truman was pretty clear—”

“This has nothing to do with the Kemp case,” Oliver interrupts me. “Or at least, not directly, anyway. Just, um—” I assume he’s about to tell me to clean myself up. Maybe splash some water on my face. But then we think the same thing: it won’t make any difference. I lift an eyebrow and almost smile.

“Let me grab my bag.”