“I’m sure.”

Will tries to make excuses. Maybe someone had wiped up a spill with it. Paint, mud, some mess the dogs made. “Maybe dog shit,” he says, and it’s so unlike Will to be crass like that. But perhaps, like me, he’s scared. “Maybe one of the boys cut himself,” he suggests, and he reminds me then of the time Otto was small and ran the pad of his thumb across the razor’s sharp blade just to see what it would feel like, though he had been told before to never touch Daddy’s razor. The razor sliced through his skin. There was a surge of blood that Otto tried to hide from us. He didn’t want to get in trouble. We found bloodstained tissues packed in the garbage can, an infection festering days later on his thumb.

“This isn’t the same thing as playing with razors,” I tell Will. “This is far different than that. The washcloth, Will, was wet through with blood. Not a few drops of blood, but it was literally soaked. Imogen killed her,” I say decisively. “She killed her and wiped herself clean with that washcloth.”

“It isn’t fair what you’re doing to her, Sadie,” he says, voice loud, and I don’t know if he’s yelling at me or yelling over the wind. But he’s most definitely yelling. “This is a witch hunt,” he says.

“Morgan’s necklace was here, too,” I go on. “I found it on the stairs. I stepped on it. I set it on the kitchen counter and now it’s gone. Imogen took it to hide the evidence.”

“Sadie,” he says. “I know you don’t like her. I know she hasn’t taken kindly to you. But you can’t keep blaming her for every little thing that goes wrong.”

His choice of words strikes me as strange. Every little thing.

Murder is not an inconsequential thing.

“If not Imogen, then someone in this house killed her,” I tell Will. “That’s a given. Because how else can you explain her necklace on our floor, the bloody washcloth in the laundry. If not her, then who?” I ask, and at first the question is rhetorical. At first I ask it only to make him see that of course it was Imogen because no one else in the house is capable of murder. If she did it once—yanking that stool from beneath her mother’s feet—she could do it again.

But then, in the silence that follows, my eyes come to land on Otto’s angry drawing with the decapitated head and the blobs of blood. The fact that he’s regressed to playing with dolls. And I think of the way my fourteen-year-old son carried a knife to school.

I draw in a sudden breath, wondering if Imogen isn’t the only one in this house who is capable of murder. I don’t mean for the thought to leave my head. And yet it does.

“Could it have been Otto?” I think aloud, wishing as soon as the words are out that I could take them back, put them back in my head where they belong.

“You can’t be serious,” Will says, and I don’t want to be serious. I don’t want to believe for a second that Otto could do this. But it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. Because the same argument rings true: if he did it once, he could do it again.

“But what about Otto’s history of violence?” I ask.

“Not a history of violence,” Will insists. “Otto never hurt anyone, remember?”

“But how do you know he wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t been caught first? If that student hadn’t turned him in, how do you know he wouldn’t have hurt his classmates, Will?”

“We can’t know what he would have done. But I’d like to believe our son isn’t a killer,” Will says. “Wouldn’t you?”

Will is right. Otto never hurt any of those kids back at his old high school. But the intent was there. The motive. A weapon. He very intentionally took a knife to school. There’s no telling what he might have done if his plan hadn’t been thwarted in time. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because I want to believe only the best about our son. Because I won’t let myself think Otto could take another life,” he says, and I’m overcome with the strangest combination of fear and guilt that I don’t know which prevails. Am I more scared that Otto has murdered a woman? Or do I feel more guilty for allowing myself to think this?

This is my son I’m speaking of. Is my son capable of murder?

“Don’t you know that, Sadie? Do you really believe Otto could do this?” he asks, and it’s my silence that gets the best of him. My unknowingness. My silent admission that, yes, I do think maybe Otto could have done this.

Will breathes out loudly, feathers ruffled. His words are clipped. “What Otto did, Sadie,” Will says, words razor-sharp, “is a far cry from murder. He’s fourteen, for God’s sake. He’s a kid. He acted in self-defense. He stood up for himself the only way he knew how. You’re being irrational, Sadie.”

“But what if I’m not?” I ask.

Will’s response is immediate. “But you are,” he says. “What Otto did was stand up for himself when no one else would.”

He stops there but I know he wants to say more. He wants to tell me that Otto took matters into his own hands because of me. Because even though Otto told me about the harassment, I didn’t intervene. Because I wasn’t listening. There was a hotline at the school. A bullying hotline. I could have called and left an anonymous complaint. I could have called a teacher or the school principal and made a not-so-anonymous complaint. But instead I did nothing; I ignored him, even if unintentionally.

Will has yet to call me out on this. And yet I see it there in the unspoken words. Silently, he’s castigating me. He thinks it’s my fault Otto took that knife to school because I didn’t offer a more reasonable alternative, a more appropriate alternative for our fourteen-year-old son.

Otto isn’t a murderer. He would never have hurt those kids, I don’t think.

He’s a troubled boy, a scared boy.