“Don’t Mrs. Miller me and pretend you have any idea what this is like,” Meghan says. She straightens up and swings back her hair. Kateri has backed onto the desk, farther away.

“Are we done here?” Meghan says to Hurt. “I have to pick up my daughter. I have to make arrangements for her father’s funeral.” Her voice is gravel and harsh, the sound of the cry still lodged in her throat.

Hurt presses his lips so that they disappear. “Yeah,” he says.

It’s Hurt who walks her out and Kateri who stays several feet behind, pretending to pay attention to a file in her hands. When Meghan leaves, Hurt comes back and stands close to Kateri, not touching.

“It was him,” he says.

She just looks at him. It was him in so many ways, she thinks.

“At your house,” he adds.

“Yeah,” she mutters.

“He was trying to subdue you. If not by seduction,” Hurt says, “then by force.”

“Apparently,” Kateri says. She feels far away and empty.

“But he got neither one,” Hurt says.

The memory of it, so recent, rattles her core, turns her insides to a running motor, rumbling. She thinks of his face in hers, his snarl. The roll of his foot on the candle and the tumble of his body down the stairs.

“How’d you get rid of him?” Hurt asks.

“I pushed him down the stairs,” she says.

Hurt smiles and looks her in the eye. “Yeah you did,” he says.

The stranger doesn’t last the night. It’s Kateri who goes in early the next morning, after she has taken the girl back to her own apartment, nestled her on the couch with Shannon. She lets herself into the cell wing before five in the morning, when the light is just a lavender glow coming over the tops of the trees.

She finds him curled on his side like a shell. Brittle, intricate, empty.

She sits for a moment on the steel bed and puts her hand to his cool face. She feels for a pulse, but knows without searching. He is still. It may have been an hour or more. His face, pale and bluish.

His knees are tight, his arms close to his chest, and his hands folded under his cheek.

She tries to pray, but her mind is empty, white, quiet. She studies his face instead, the dark fringe of lashes, his soft mouth gone tight and rigid in death.

He had nothing to lose.

THIRTY-ONE: SHANNON

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3

When they hand me back my possessions in jail, they’re in a plastic bag marked INMATE PROPERTY. The keys to Bear’s house and the Land Rover are in there. I have my learner’s permit from when I turned sixteen, already expired, half a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and ten dollars.

Kateri walks me to the front door and out onto the sidewalk, where it’s bright and cold. They keep Birdie for a few more questions with a caseworker and a child psychologist.