Were they defending Brady? Like Michael and I had set him up? This wasn’t some creepy episode of Criminal Minds, where the truth was always the most extreme explanation. But in a world where dismemberment was only one house away, the truth was extreme.

The same poster who’d opened the thread wrote: I think it would be more common for Brady’s wife to have been involved than for a couple he’d only met like a year previously. We’re still waiting on more details about the number of his victims, but IMHO it’s likely a serial killer would have been operating for much longer than that.

Thank you. At least someone didn’t think Michael was the devil.

Then the full import of what I’d read sunk in.

Brady’s wife. Lena.

Of course she must have been involved. She must have known what he was doing. I shut the laptop and pushed it away from me, but the leaden weight of the truth was cold iron in my gut.

Somehow I’d tamped down the full gravity of that knowledge and fought back against it, but after seeing it printed in the blunt words of an anonymous stranger, there was no way I could doubt it. I’d been so focused on Brady, his voyeurism and violence, and on Michael, the way his trauma had changed him, that I’d been able to skirt the truth.

Lena was another friend I’d never really known.

I must have groaned, because Grace stuck her lip out, her tiny brows drawn together.

When I didn’t immediately smile and say something reassuring, her face crumpled and she wailed.

I was being stupid, poking at an open wound. There weren’t any answers: not online, not from Michael, not from the police, not if Lena herself rose from the dead. Death didn’t have a reason why; no explanation was good enough.

Shutting the laptop, I slid it under the sofa and reached out, pulling Grace close. Her head smelled so sweet, and she turned her face into the crook of my neck and snuffled. My tears dampened her soft hair, and we sat like that for a while. I wished I could be content to keep my eyes closed.

But I knew I wasn’t ready to stop looking.

Another evening of awkwardness, another night of restless dreams, another morning where Michael drove away early, leaving me both relieved and bereft.