So much for stealth. The footsteps came quickly across the hall and ran up the stairs. My fear was real, and yet I found myself distracted by the state of the bathroom floor. It wasn’t just soaking wet—it was red. It wasn’t usually red, was it? I thought of all the times I’d perched on the edge of the tub with Stella’s note in my hand, staring fixedly at the worn linoleum. No, it wasn’t usually red.

My feet had gone red too, and there were red splashes up my ankles. Cory had reached the landing, and I was half aware that I must either shut the door or turn to face him, but I stayed put, staring at my feet. I didn’t look at the bath. All I could think was that somehow the dye had leaked from my dress and flooded the floor, although it puzzled me how this could have happened when the material was bone-dry.

It wasn’t Cory who came up behind me; it was Tom. I knew because he spoke my name as he reached the top of the stairs. He stopped in the bathroom doorway and something else came from his mouth—not my name, not even a word, but a startled sound—and I had to look up to see what he had seen.

I saw pieces of the picture, but I couldn’t fit them together in my mind. I saw the bathtub overflowing with a thin, red soup. I saw a white arm hanging over the side of the tub, and a craft knife covered in pink droplets. I saw fleshy gleams under the water, and Cory’s head beside the taps. I saw his chin resting on his chest, and the ends of his hair floating, and scrunched-up papers drifting like water lilies on the surface, and the writing on them—my handwriting—blurring and running, and trailing inky tendrils under the surface of the water. I kept waiting for Cory to raise his eyes and braced myself for the look I’d get, but he never stirred.

Tom was saying things, doing things, dialling numbers into his phone, and I jumped when he touched my arm. He asked a halting question or two and apparently I answered quite sensibly, although I don’t know how, when I couldn’t hear a thing above the roaring in my head.

There were a lot of questions that day, although not many more from Tom, because he was too kind to persist. He even tried to answer some of the questions on my behalf, but the police didn’t like that. They wanted my account.