“Did you bring it?” she said, as she welcomed me in from the cold.

“Is there sausage?”

“The way you can gorge without doing the decent thing and becoming monstrously fat—it simply baffles.”

“I assure you—when out of your sight, I eat as delicately as a bird.”

She honked out a laugh. I followed her across the polished parquet, beneath a dripping, wax-encrusted chandelier, past a heavenly staircase that twisted to the floors above. Candles flickered over photos of relatives long dead, posed as stiff as corpses but smiling, as the Falls usually did, like hoodlums. The final picture showed Ana, severely corseted, flanked by her children: a boy with hair as matted as beaver fur and a smirking young woman named Mary Fall.

In a dining room decorated with haunting landscapes of upstate New York, we sat at the corner of a table that could seat twenty-four paunchy men. Ana rang a bell, and a segment of wall shot open to reveal two steaming dishes of fatty sausage, buttered toast, and egg pudding. She carried the plates herself, hands shaking just enough to keep it interesting. The first bite warmed me down to my calluses, and I did not stop until I was numb with grease. I dried my fingers on the tablecloth.

Now it was time to pay the check.

I slid Bex Red’s envelope across the table. Ana flipped it open and eased out the picture. She stared at it for a long time, then slumped back and sighed.

“Can I see it?” I said.

“You don’t usually like to look.”

“The dreams have gotten worse.”

She handed it to me. Bex’s effortless lines showed a middle-aged woman sitting at her kitchen table, a tomato sandwich in one hand and a neatly folded newspaper in the other. The table was my table. The woman was my mother.

Mary Fall died of pneumonia the summer of my tenth year. I’d thought that pain forgotten until last year, when I killed for the first time and she began to appear in my sleep. The dreams were violent enough to wake me, strange enough that I couldn’t shake them, and when they became unbearable I began visiting the only woman in New York who might understand.

I’d hardly known Ana when my parents were alive, but she welcomed me without question and fed me well. When I told her how I was torturing myself with drawings of my victims living the lives I’d cut short, she asked if Bex could do the same for the daughter she’d lost decades before. We rarely spoke of Mary—we rarely spoke at all—but when we did, it was like opening a steam valve that eased the pressure and let me breathe again.

“She looks happy,” I said.

“She doesn’t. She looks normal. That’s enough.”

I gave it back to her.