Like the household saint.

The expression on her face has changed, my friend insisted. She looks sadder.

No, not exactly sadder, I said. But maybe softer. The first time I saw her I thought she looked a bit stern.

She disapproved of us before. Now she’s accepted us.

She’s gotten to know us better. Now she likes us.

It is soothing, my friend said, to look at her. If you keep staring at her eyes, it calms you.

Put a halo on her, I said, and she’d look like an icon.

Beneath the portrait stood a narrow marble-topped table. One day my friend placed a candle there and a small pewter vase of wildflowers she had picked.

You’ve made a shrine, I said. It makes me want to pray to her.

Let us pray.

I dreamed that I was asleep, my friend said, and in my dream I opened my eyes and saw her standing by the bed, bending over me.

It wasn’t a dream. I saw her too.

—

Maybe you could read to me for a while, she said. I’ve never liked audiobooks, but now, when I can’t read myself, it’s nice to be read to.

I asked her what she wanted me to read, and she pointed to the paperback splayed on the coffee table, where I’d left it days ago.

I love mysteries, she said. I used to read one or two a week. You don’t have to start from the beginning, just summarize what’s happened so far.

In the last part of the book, the narrative switches from third to first person. Speaking now is the budding actress, and we learn that everything we’ve read so far has been her fictionalization of events taken from life. The book, written under a masculine pseudonym, is about to be published. Now we learn about her life in the three decades since her relationship with the serial killer: how that experience had traumatized her to the point that she was barely able to function let alone continue pursuing her once-so-promising acting career. And it turns out there was more, much horrible more to the story.