I am no longer on the mountain. I am far away. Another place, another time. My wife lies in the bed next to me.

Life is a circle, they say. We begin where we end. I no longer argue with such truisms. I close my eyes and find myself back where I started, on that dock there, on the far side of the mountain, clutching her necklace in my hand.

PART ONE

Sara and Elizabeth

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1.

Some of you will remember this story. It was ten years ago, and I was employed then as a forensic psychologist in Marin County. Much of my work involved talking to criminals, then testifying as to their sanity in a court of law. On the afternoon this all began, for example—that afternoon when I blacked out in Sara Johnson’s apartment—I was scheduled to examine a man who’d been accused of strangling his wife.

Because of that incident, and all that has happened since, I know many people will be suspicious of anything I put down here. Jake Danser is not to be trusted, they will say. I have ulterior motives. I pretend to be whole-hearted, confessing minor flaws to hide a deeper evil.

I am not innocent of everything, I admit. I was thirty-seven years old then, vain in the way of men at that stage of life, wanting to own the world and feeling that I’d reached a pivot point, a time of reckoning. At the same time, I had my own predilections and my own past, and these things bound me in ways hard to escape. Maybe those old emotions, coming again to the surface, triggered the incident that day at Sara’s apartment. Or maybe the cause lay elsewhere. I don’t know. I can’t say for sure.

On that afternoon, I met with Sara Johnson at her apartment in Sausalito. Sara was an attorney, ten years younger than myself. She worked for the public defender's office, and we knew each other on account of a case I had taken regarding an aging schizophrenic who refused to take his medication. My testimony had kept him out of the asylum, and Sara admired me for this. She was a wholesome girl, idealistic and straightforward—except for the fact she’d been meeting with me these past weeks, surreptitiously, in back offices, elevators, closets. Furtive encounters that had been building in intensity, so now we were together in her apartment, having stolen away for the afternoon.

I made a couple of drinks, preparing them carefully. Vodka for her, gin for me.

She sighed deeply and went into the kitchen. When she came back, her glass was empty.

“That was quick.”

“The Mori case, it’s all anyone’s talking about,” she said. “Did you see that spread in the paper?”

“I did.”