I know he wants to ask more. But he’s studying my face uncertainly, assessing whether I can handle any more questions.

“I don’t know,” I say.

And it’s true. I should feel relieved, vindicated even—it wasn’t a momentary lapse in judgment or a silly extravagance; it wasn’t my fault at all—but instead I feel nothing. I’m met only with the certainty that the fraternity was involved and the crushing knowledge that there’s nothing I can do about it. And without that sense of purpose, of justice, I feel completely lost.

We sit in silence until the record ends, and I make my way upstairs.

It’s not until later, after I’ve inspected my burns, applied my salves, and slipped into bed, that I realize neither addressed the fact that I was speaking in German.

Sixteen

Sunday, December 8, 8:00 A.M.

Morning comes too soon, and I’m pulling a jacket over a pair of my mother’s navy slacks with only half an idea of what I’m doing.

The dreams are getting worse—mechanical bells, a confined space, the sense that some integral piece of myself has been ripped away, and then an infinite, indescribable loneliness. And German. Always German. A German that I don’t understand in the morning. That I didn’t know before I fell asleep. And the feeling that the fire uncovered something buried. Not just what happened with Craig, but something deeper. A reverse funeral pyre—stirring living shapes from the ashes and making them whole.

Forbidden from going to the station and with nothing better to do, I unload the contents of my satchel onto the kitchen table like I used to unpack my backpack in high school. The folder with the call sheets. My notes from the interviews. And something else. After everything that happened in the past forty-eight hours, I forgot Ben’s voicemail and the envelope I slipped into my bag when I left the station Friday morning.

I’ve got something for you. Nothing else. We do that sometimes—say as little as possible. It might be to pique someone’s curiosity, but most of the time, it’s because we don’t want a biased response. After all, if you give someone a Rorschach test and tell them they’re looking at a giant moth, they’re likely to see a giant moth. But if you wait and let them see for themselves, they may come up with something entirely different.

But the top document tells me what I need to know: missing student report.

Colin Haines. Nineteen years old. White male.