A wave of nausea curls around my stomach; I don’t remember the last time I’ve eaten, brushed my teeth, partaken in small and simple human pleasures. I feel as though I’m the physical form of something much bigger than myself now. Maybe those things don’t matter any more. That quiet night we had on the beach, the night Peyton kissed me, feels like it happened in another lifetime, to another girl.

I believe things are going to move very quickly from here.

Peyton sighs. ‘Well, shit, Mona, what are you gonna do? What’s gonna happen?’

‘I don’t know yet.’ I’m scared, I want to say, but I don’t. I’m scared. Hold me. I don’t like whatever this feeling is, how at odds my desire to grab her by the neck is with my other equal desire for her to be tender and familiar towards me. I don’t know what I need. I’ve never known what I need. I don’t even know her. ‘I want to talk to Ellis first.’

Peyton exhales, finally realizing that she is in over her head, and I get the sense there is something she wants to say that she isn’t saying, but I have neither the time nor the mental faculties to sit here wondering what it might be. ‘Here,’ she says, walks behind me and gently places a granola bar and an energy drink on my desk. ‘You look awful.’

‘Thanks.’

So what do we do? Just wait? What evidence are they going to find on a coat that’s been buried for thirty-five years? Even if they test the blood, even if we know it’s definitely Roxy’s – I mean, we already know that. It’s in the picture. Clear as day.

Somebody buried a bloodstained jacket that had belonged to Roxy Raines – with a cross.

But why would they do that? Where is the body? You leave a cross for someone who you know has definitely died. But a bloodstained jacket doesn’t mean they knew that. Maybe whoever killed her had dumped her in the sea, but felt sympathetic enough to leave something behind – but what kind of so-called sympathetic killer violently murders someone and throws them in the ocean? And then leaves notes behind mocking Roxy’s mom – who, in fairness, she hated – after her death? It doesn’t make any sense. A murder? An accident?

Where’s the body?

I feel my mind slipping. There must be something I’ve missed. Something that we missed.

Now more than ever I mourn my destroyed notes. I scroll through my phone, looking for something, anything. Snippets from conversations. The interview with Lenore, my interview with Henry. How can there be nothing? How have I been working all this time, this whole time, feeling like my fingers are gripping a crumbling cliffside, barely holding on, and have nothing to show for it?