Nora crosses her legs and rests the pad on her thigh and pretends to be taking notes but really she’s drawing neat, tiny grids and then blacking out every other square, a thinking habit she has maintained since she was in elementary school.

“I told my partner you didn’t do it. I told my partner that when we found you, you’d be dead. A victim, just like your boyfriend. He was your boyfriend, right? Then you showed up with a knife. Blood all over you. Now my partner, he thinks he’s right and I’m wrong. But I’m rarely wrong. I don’t think you’re a killer. Can you help me prove that? Can you help me understand what happened? I know you know something that will make me right and him wrong. Anything you want to talk about, I’m here to listen. What do you say, Ashley?”

Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. Here and there Nora punctuates the silence with a barrage of questions. She looks to the one-way mirror and knows that Jenkins is likely dozing on the other side of it.

Maybe Chives is right after all. Maybe Ashley did it. Given the right circumstances, everybody’s capable of killing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a cross-stitching grandma or a five-year-old boy with candy-stained fingers. It doesn’t matter if you’re God-fearing or flinchingly passive, if you’ve got a PhD or you’re ten or two feet tall or your eyes are fogged with glaucoma. Everybody, anybody might be guilty. Nora has worked the job long enough that she knows this for a fact. She has seen everything the human nightmare is capable of.

Usually the math is pretty simple. Sometimes it’s a will or life insurance that makes a daughter nudge her father off a sea cliff or a son puncture the gas line while his family is sleeping. Sometimes it’s an affair that makes a wife stir thirty Tylenols into a bottle of wine to shut her husband’s liver down. Sometimes it’s a promotion. Sometimes it’s religion. Sometimes it’s revenge. Sometimes it’s pure dumb rage.

The point is, everyone has stared hard at somebody and imagined a chalk line around that person’s body. Everyone is capable of slashing a knife or pulling a trigger. Probably you’re not going to, but you could—you can.

If Ashley did it, Nora wants to understand the why. She’s getting nowhere, so she tries to think of what Chives would do. And Chives would talk. Blabber, even. Go on and on and try to get the suspect to feel that he was relatable, that whatever crime had been committed was completely understandable, even forgivable.