A year ago, I might have jumped at the chance for Aimee to be beholden to me. She’d be in danger, I’d save her life, and then she’d confess everything and clear my name. But now I hesitated. I could pretend I was wrong about the picture, that the postcard meant nothing. But I wanted Elizabeth to think I was a good person. No, more than that, I wanted to be a good person.

I will. I’d warn Aimee, I would. But even as I typed my answer into the phone, my skin prickled. What if I was too late?

In the gritty light of morning, I went back to Aimee’s page. She hadn’t posted anything new, but the story was still there, time-stamped seven hours ago. Lena could have done a lot in seven hours.

I enlarged my copy of the photo again. The woman with her face turned away from the camera looked like Lena. But was she really? Even though nearly two years had gone by, Aimee was definitively herself. No question, positive identification, that was the bitch who’d wrecked my life. But the woman next to her was like a police artist’s sketch. My head was comparing her height, her hair, her build and not coming up with a conclusive answer. Yet my body tensed with certainty. Wherever the police thought Lena was, I believed she was here.

I slid out of bed, dropped the phone on my pillow, and started throwing on clothes. None of the victims I’d heard about on the news had a personal connection to Lena or to Brady. Maybe that had made me feel strangely safer, as though our relationship would keep me alive, but that was stupid. Killing random people instead of neighbors was just another way of not getting caught. It was calculated, not compassionate.

And I couldn’t shake TXSally808’s suspicion. If Lena and Brady had killed the man who’d previously owned our home, there was something different about it. Not just that it was personal, petty, a violent reaction to a few HOA complaints. The other crimes, the ones getting publicity, were splashy, obvious murders. This other one had been stealthy, carefully orchestrated to look like an accident. So sad. Could have happened to anyone. Just like …

My stomach clenched, bile rising.

Just like Sandy.

No. But even as I tried to reject the idea, my mind kept whispering. Lena was working on her house. Lena hated her. Lena was so much taller and stronger than Sandy. Sandy was threatening not to pay Lena, was going to badmouth her business.

A second death in our neighborhood, another older person living alone dead from an apparent slip and fall. A person who just happened to have had a run-in with Lena.