Mia had a weird wisdom about her. She always seemed to know what her parents needed before they did, bringing them ice packs or chocolate or coffee. Rubbing their temples with her tiny fingers. Asking them if they wanted to watch some television to relax. In this case she had three plates on the counter and she was knifing peanut butter and raspberry jam onto bread slices. “I knowed you guys would come.”

“You guys?” Nora said.

“What did you make me?” Jack said, entering the kitchen behind her. His voice was husky with sleep. “And why do you have a gun?”

Nora looked at the pistol and sighed, setting it on the counter. But it looked foolish there, so she tucked it hurriedly in the junk drawer before rubbing her eyes and saying, “We should all be in bed.”

A fresh, angry wind blasted the house and Jack said, “There’s no point trying to sleep with all that racket.”

Then they gathered together and ate the sandwiches Mia had made them.

“These are perfect,” Jack said through a full mouth.

“You know what would make them even better than perfect?” Mia said.

“What?” Nora said.

“Hot cocoa,” Jack said.

“That’s it,” their daughter said. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

But that was years ago. Now it’s day, not night. It’s two of them, not three. And it’s coffee, not hot cocoa, that Nora and Jack have in their mugs as they file out of the kitchen.

They go into the living room, which looks more like a war room. Nora has collected all the information from the local precincts—the photographs, transcripts, and reports of the past week—and printed them from her home office. She and Jack then laid everything out in a grid on the floor, some of the pages still warm from the printer and smelling of toner. Small pathways allow the two of them to navigate the timeline.

At the center of the grid she has a map of Sea-Tac metro, and with a red marker she has neatly noted all relevant locations. When she takes a step from one section of the grid to another, she travels the equivalent of many miles. When she crouches down, she drops a thousand feet into a photograph of someone’s backyard. She has a telescopic and microscopic view simultaneously.

Most people think of time as a straight line—you wake up, you go to sleep; you’re born, you die—but she knows that time moves in many directions at once. This is why her wristwatch and bedside clock are analog, not digital. Digital clocks are a lie that show you stationary in a moment, fixed in time, but analog clocks never stop moving; they’re a constant swirl, all the numbers visible at once. Her mind is a constant swirl of yesterday and today and tomorrow—and so is the floor before her, a confused calendar of violence.