I turn and realize that I’ve walked so far the house is almost out of view and that, despite myself, I was thinking about Craig. About the party, the one with the hunch punch, and drugs, and girls passed out on couches, everyone too drunk, too young. About the blue lights that broke the dawn early the next morning, the girl who sobbed uncontrollably, and the brothers who looked passively on. The strange turn of events that brought me to where I am now, running away from another group of Ken dolls like I’m nineteen all over again, wondering whether, if Craig hadn’t convinced me to go to school and then abandoned me for his stupid fraternity, I might have done something entirely different with my life.

A part of me broke that year. It wasn’t so much the thought of being alone—I was used to that—but of being left behind. And I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing Craig accidentally—of turning a corner and finding myself face-to-face with him, his brothers, and everything that happened. So I moved back to Athens, completely unmoored.

It’s one of those things that only becomes clear when you trace all the colors and incongruous shapes backward and see how they fit together—a through line from your present to the past. But I know for certain that had I stayed in Atlanta, had I been abroad, had I been anywhere else besides my hometown trying to pull myself together, I wouldn’t have been working at a bar downtown when it happened: the triple murder on a spring afternoon.

When I close my eyes, I still see them. The crowds of people waiting for a bike race. The theater troupe attending a picnic. At first, everyone assumed it was a theatrical stunt, a prop gun, because no one could grasp that what they witnessed—the mathematics professor gunning down his wife and two community theater actors—was real. But then people from the street rushed into the bar, word spread that the city was in lockdown, and police officers in combat gear went door-to-door.