This time, it was just unlucky that Sadie got to that laundry before me.

I’ve been careless. Because the night with Morgan, the transformation from Camille to Sadie happened too quickly, leaving me to clean up the mess. Her clothes I burned. The knife I buried. I just never counted on Sadie doing the laundry. Why would I? She never does. I also never knew that Camille had taken Morgan’s necklace. Not until I saw it sitting on the countertop this morning.

Camille should have been more careful where she stood that night. She should have better anticipated the sprays of blood. It wasn’t like it was her first rodeo. But she came home a bloody mess. It was up to me to wipe her clean, leaving my fingerprints on the knife and washcloth. I couldn’t let the police find that.

Sadie rubs at her face and says again, “I just don’t know what to believe.”

“It’s been a long day. A stressful day. And you haven’t been taking your pills,” I say. It dawns on her. She went to bed without taking her pills. She forgot about them this morning. I know because they’re still where I left them.

That’s why she feels this way, out of control as she always does when she doesn’t have her pills. She reaches eagerly for them, swallows them down, knowing that in a short while she’ll be back to feeling like herself.

I almost laugh out loud. The pills do nothing. It’s only in Sadie’s head that something happens. The placebo effect. Because she thinks popping a pill will naturally make her feel better. Have a headache, pop some Tylenol. A runny nose? Some Sudafed.

You’d think, as a doctor, Sadie would know better.

I bought the empty capsules online. I filled them with cornstarch, replaced the ones the doctor prescribed with these. Sadie took them like a good girl, but she’d whine about it at times, say the pills made her tired and fuzzy because that’s what pills are supposed to do.

She can be so suggestible sometimes.

I make Sadie dinner. I pour her a glass of wine. I sit her down at the table and, as she eats, I rub her cold, dirty feet. They’re mottled and gray.

She nods off at the table, so tired she sleeps upright.

But she sleeps for only a second at best, and when she awakes, she groggily asks, voice slurred with fatigue, “How did you get home in the storm? Otto said the ferries weren’t running.”

So many questions. So many fucking questions.

“Water taxi.”

“What time was that?”

“I’m not sure. In time to get Tate.”

She’s coming to now, speaking clearly. “They kept the kids at school all day? Even with the storm?”

“They kept them there until parents could get to them.”

“So you went straight to the elementary school? You didn’t come home first?” she asks. I tell her no. She’s cobbling together a timeline. I wonder why. I tell her I took the water taxi to the island, picked up Tate, came home. Then I went to the public safety building for her.

Only some of it is true.

“What was Otto doing when you came home?” she asks.

I’ll have to shut her up soon. Because her curiosity is the only thing standing between me and getting off scot-free.

SADIE

I stand in the bedroom, rummaging through my drawers, finding clean pajamas to replace the ones I have on. I need a shower. My feet are aching, my legs bruised. But these things are inconsequential when there are bigger worries on my mind. It’s an out-of-body experience. What’s happening can’t possibly be happening to me.

I spin suddenly with the knowledge that I’m no longer alone. It’s a metaphysical sensation, something that moves up my spine.

Otto comes into the bedroom unannounced. He’s not there and then he is. His sudden arrival makes me leap, my hand going to my heart. I come to face him. The signs of his illness are now visible.

He wasn’t lying. He’s sick. He coughs into a hand, his eyes vacant and feverish.

I think of the last conversation I had with Otto, where he accused me of putting the knife in his backpack. If what that policewoman said is true, I didn’t do it. But the part of me known as Camille did. The guilt is enormous. Otto isn’t a murderer. Quite possibly, I am.

He says to me, “Where were you?” and then again he coughs, his voice scratchy like it wasn’t before.

Will didn’t tell the kids where I was. He didn’t tell them I wasn’t coming home. How long would he have waited to tell them? How would he have said it, what words would he have used to tell our children I’d been arrested by the police? And when they asked why, what would he have said? That their mother is a murderer?

“You just left,” he said, and I see the child still in him. He was scared, I think, panicked that he couldn’t find me.

I say vaguely, “I had something I needed to take care of.”

“I thought you were here. I didn’t know you were gone till I saw Dad outside.”

“You saw him come home with Tate?” I assume. I picture Will’s small sedan fighting its way through the snow. I can’t imagine how the car made it.

But Otto tells me no, it was before Tate came home. He says that soon after we talked in the living room, he changed his mind. He was hungry. He wanted that toast after all.

Otto says he came down to find me. But I wasn’t here. He looked for me, caught a glimpse of Will traipsing through the backyard in the snow.

But Otto is mistaken. It was me, not Will, he saw in the backyard in the snow.

“That was me,” I tell him. “I was trying to get the dogs inside,” I say. I don’t tell him about the knife.

I realize now what must have really happened with the knife back in Chicago. Camille must have put it in Otto’s backpack. The story he told me about the night, on the fire escape, when I convinced him to stab his classmates wasn’t a pipe dream. From Otto’s perspective, it happened just as he said it did. Because he saw me.