For a moment she stared up at me, dazed, before once more bursting into ragged sobs and burying her face in her hands. I hunkered down next to her and waited for her tears to stop, staring at our elongated shadows on the ground. Eventually, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“How did it happen?” she said. “How did he die?”

At this point, there was nothing to lose, so I poured out every detail of our terrible secret, reliving the traumatic incident that had made me a murderer. By the time I had finished, Fanny seemed to have recovered her composure. The confession had calmed us both. “What about you, Fanny, how did you find out?”

She struggled to her feet, took a deep breath, lit another cigarette, and smoked for a moment as she summoned old memories.

“December nineteenth, the Saturday of the snowstorm, I’d been up late studying. Back when I was trying to get into medical school, I was sleeping barely four hours a night. I think it drove me a little crazy, especially since I didn’t have any money to buy food. That night, I was so hungry I couldn’t sleep. A couple of weeks earlier, Madame Fabianski, the caretaker’s wife, had taken pity on me and given me a spare key to the cafeteria kitchen.”

In her pocket, Fanny’s beeper buzzed, but she ignored it.

“So I headed out. It was three in the morning, and I was walking across the campus to the cafeteria. Obviously, all the buildings were locked, but I knew the code to the fire door and was able to get into the dining hall. It was freezing cold, so I didn’t exactly hang around. I gobbled a box of cookies and left with half a loaf of bread and a bar of chocolate.”

She was speaking in a monotone, as though hypnotized.

“It was only as I was heading back to my building that I noticed how beautiful the scene was. It had stopped snowing, the wind had whipped away the clouds, and the sky was scattered with stars. There was a full moon. It was so magical that I decided to walk around the lake. I can still remember hearing my shoes crunching on the snow, seeing the blue reflected moon gliding on the lake.

“I saw a strange glow up on the hill, and that broke the spell. It was coming from the building site where they were working on the gym. As I got closer, I realized it wasn’t simply a glow—the whole site was lit up. I could hear the hum of an engine, the rumble of a machine. My instincts told me to stay well away, but curiosity got the better of me.”

“What did you see?”