It was the winking. If only she hadn’t winked. Winking was our thing, I told Sergei when we drove home from the store. “Some things are supposed to be sacred!” I yelled at him. I couldn’t get to sleep at night. I’d see her with her long hair and those big blue eyes, her sexy smile, those long lashes like feathers touching as she winked right in front of me. And that’s when I told him he had to get rid of her.

“Well, I guess he took you literally,” my father said when I first told him this. I nodded. Yes, this was what happened. Sergei took it literally.

I told my father and the police about the evening it happened. Sergei had said we should go out, he wanted to take me out and show me something special. If I’d just come with him, he said, it would all be better.

I wanted to believe him. It was getting dark later now because it was June. It was a pretty evening. The colours were gorgeous, all these different shades of purple and blue, just like eye shadow.

Sergei drove me to the woods near this pond where he said there were water lilies blooming. He was going to show me a surprise, prove his love to me. He was already high when he picked me up. He was on meth. That’s not something I did. He’s the drug addict.

We sat in his car and smoked a joint and then walked in on this path through the trees. It was like being in a storybook. And then we came out to this beautiful clearing and the sunset was reflecting in the pond, like the water was magic. There was a snap and I looked up and who was there but her. She must have followed us. Lulu. The sun hit her hair and she was standing there with the deep-green forest behind her like fucking Snow White. She took a few steps forward and smiled, all nervous, and said, “What was so important you needed to talk to me about, Sergei?”

Then Sergei got crazy. “Are you following me?” he said. “I told you to leave me alone. I love Isabella, not you. Can’t you accept that?”

“But Sergei, you told me to meet you here,” she said. I told the police what Lulu said. And she started crying. “But I love you,” she said to Sergei. I’m sure she said that. It sounded like that. It made me so mad.

It happened so fast. He went up to her and grabbed her by her long hair and she fell down on her knees. And then Sergei kicked her in the side and Lulu bent over. She couldn’t catch her breath. I was frozen at first. “See,” he said to me, “I’m showing you.” He kicked her in the eye, her winking eye.

I was crying, saying he should stop. That’s what I was doing. My hands are sweating, remembering this.