I’m assuming it’s you I’m writing to—the man I know as King Edward VII. I doubt the police would be stupid enough to post the details of a crime scene on a dating website. The only other person it could be is Damon’s wife, Hannah.

You don’t understand how it could be her, do you? You think that the knife, and the way you used it on Damon, and what it means, is a secret that only you and I know. Well, you’re wrong.

Still, I don’t think Hannah killed him. She didn’t have a motive—or rather, she didn’t know she had one. I took care to make sure she didn’t find out about me and Damon (not that there ever really was a “me and Damon,” of course).

I think it was you who killed him, King Edward. Even though you say in your ad that you think the killer’s a woman. Me, presumably? Are you trying to scare me, make me think you might try to frame me for Damon’s murder? I had no reason to kill him, though, did I?

You, on the other hand, had a glaringly obvious motive: you were jealous. By pretending to be Damon for so long, you allowed me—encouraged me—to fall in love with someone who was neither entirely Damon nor entirely you. I fell in love with your emails and his newspaper columns—the sensitive private “Damon” and the brash public one, combined. That was the man I became obsessed with—the fascinating, contradictory, complicated creation I fell for. Only one problem: he didn’t exist apart from in my head.

Didn’t you foresee that once you’d made me fall in love with Damon, you’d be jealous of him? Why didn’t you just make up a name—one that didn’t belong to anyone real that I might latch on to?

And you had a second reason for killing Damon, too: to prove that you weren’t him. After the way you’d tricked me, you knew I’d never trust a word you said ever again. You’d told me that you weren’t Damon Blundy, but why would I believe you? I did, eventually, but it took a while. For a few weeks, I continued to believe you might be Damon pretending not to be Damon. Once I knew you were willing to lie to me so flagrantly, anything could have been true. You could have been lying when you said you were him or lying when you said you weren’t him—how did I know?