‘I know.’ I step outside the room, and right before I’ve disappeared from view I drum my fingers against the width of the door and say without looking at her, ‘We’re almost there, though,’ and I go.

Classic move of a breaker-and-enterer – to return to the place they have just broken into and entered.

I don’t know what else to do. I walk there in a daze.

The morning is radiant and bleached, blue in an almost surreal way; the moon, I see, is pressed against the sky like a semi-translucent stamp, hovering a finger’s length above the mainland.

I feel inexplicably like I’ve found all the pieces but not the order in which to arrange them, seemingly unrelated information like the limbs of an exquisite corpse impossible to neatly bind.

There’s a mass of cops situated around the diner. I don’t see Booker anywhere. Mary Anne stands at their perimeter. A woman wearing thick gloves prods at the jagged glass of the broken window. A blackened wave of numbness rushes through me; how easy it was last night to shirk the consequences of a necessary act – how easy it’d be now to prove that I’d done it. Though at this point, I’m unsure if that matters.

Mary Anne and I are locked in a gaze from maybe thirty paces away. She moves from the cops to meet me. ‘Suppose,’ she says, ‘there’s no point in asking you if you saw anything.’

I tell her what I know. The keys, the picture, sending ‘Baby Blue’ through the radio, the note in her car, the note sent to the Willowwood. She barely so much as flinches the whole time.

‘And what are you planning on doing with any of that?’

My blood runs cold. It’s what I’ve been saying to myself this whole time, but hearing someone else say it – hearing Mary Anne say it – is a different beast. Perhaps I’ve accomplished nothing at all.

One of the officers calls from the diner. ‘Mary Anne?’

I don’t know what to do. Where to go. For the entirety of their conversation, they’re all looking at me, and Mary Anne keeps shaking her head.

She shrugs. ‘She didn’t see nothin’.’

She doesn’t want to say I did it and I don’t know why.

I don’t know what to do besides go back to the dorm, then hopefully try and find Ellis so I can talk to him. Lenore stops me on the way back, looking flustered, make-up smudged a little under her eyes. ‘Oh, I was hoping you’d be here – I figured as much. I heard about the diner, and I thought, well, I suppose that girl will go where the trouble goes.’

She takes a sharp theatrical breath to collect herself.