She’d heard that the weather didn’t try to kill you with heat or cold, and that was just fine for her. The most damage Seattle could do was a misty rain that made you feel a damp sort of sleepiness. Juno hadn’t taken much with her when she’d left Albuquerque, only what she could carry in her thrifted suitcase. Just a handful of memories, among them Kregger’s reading glasses, which she occasionally used.

She ended up moving into the Turlin Street house fifteen years after Winnie and Nigel purchased it. By then, all the renovations had been finished and the downstairs had a small apartment with its own entrance. The first time she saw the house—red brick in front of a backdrop of purple-gray clouds, like some sort of painting—she’d sighed. She wasn’t there to see about a place to live, just to admire the house in its Gothic beauty. But then the opportunity had presented itself, and Juno had taken it. She was in deep need of change, and the house on Turlin had beckoned her. Juno had stood rooted to the sidewalk as someone drove by blasting music. She took the first steps toward her new home as the singer sang “I knew that it was now or never…”

Their son, a lean bean with sandy hair and blond eyelashes, seemed equally as puzzled by his parents as Juno was. She often spotted him shaking his head at them when they weren’t looking, like he couldn’t believe the stupidity. She suspected that Samuel scored high on the Wechsler, higher probably than both Winnie and Nigel combined. Juno had seen it many times over the years, parents bringing their children in for Juno to fix like they were appliances instead of complex individuals. You couldn’t fix a child—they didn’t need fixing right out of the box. Kids just needed a healthy example of love to thrive beneath. He found her sitting on a bench by the water just yesterday, and they’d had the biggest and best of heart-to-hearts. She was certain that she was the only person with whom Sam could discuss his interests, as disturbing as they may have been to anyone besides Juno. And she had told him that as they sat next to the lake—the lake that she had described as “Calm as rice.”

“Calm as rice?” he had laughed, grasping at his abdomen and rocking his head side to side.

“That’s right,” Juno said. “Calm as rice.”

“I’ve never heard that before.”

When he had sat down next to her, his eyebrows were drawn. He looked more like an unsure child and less like the opinionated boy she’d grown to know.

“You know some of the most famous serial killers of all time are from Washington?”