I nodded. After my night with Detective Rigby, I understood. I had felt like every word and action was being filed away and assessed. I thought then of the gun under Rick’s sink. The electrical tape. The things he had hidden away. Also: the light on at his house, the bed that was still made when I showed up. All the things the police could’ve found or noticed.

But he had gone to check on the body. He had made sure my hands were clean before the detective showed up. I felt partially guilty—I was the one who had pulled Rick into the nightmare, who had gone straight to him instead of to the police.

“I just got home. This is my friend Elyse.”

“Hi there,” he said, taking one step back. “I see you’re in good hands, then. You just holler if you need anything.”

“Thanks, you know I will.”

He turned back but stopped halfway. “Everything go okay with Nina?”

“Nina?” Elyse cut in. “Wasn’t that the detective?”

I knew Rick had given a statement, just as I had—and I wanted to ask. Wanted to make sure they matched up, wanted to know whether there was anything else the police had mentioned to Rick. But not with Elyse here. Not with the police just on the other side of the walls.

“Yes,” I said, answering them both. “It was fine. She brought me to the hospital for my knee.” I gestured down. “I needed stitches.”

“Oh, good. Good,” Rick said. “I know her family. She was always a good kid.” Then he turned away.

None of us were kids anymore, but I wondered if Rick could only see us that way, so far removed from his own past. “Call if you need anything, Rick,” I said to his back.

I closed the back door, and the silverware drawer rattled, a quirk of the house.

He raised his hand in acknowledgment as he walked away. I watched from the window, standing beside Elyse, as he turned back for his own house, satisfied that I was home and safe.

“That was odd,” Elyse said, the moment between us long gone.

“No. That’s just Rick. He keeps an eye on me.”

“Mm,” she said, turning back to the eggs. “Where do you keep the whisk?”

I pulled out the middle drawer, handed it to her, and as she turned away, beating the eggs over the countertop, I stared at the top drawer.

A box cutter, she’d said. Something sharp and short and efficient. I’d used mine just a few days earlier to open the box of my mother’s things. I held my breath, eased the top drawer open slightly. Pens and scissors and a pad of paper. I moved a few things around with shaking hands, but I didn’t have to. I could already tell: It was gone.

“I should’ve asked,” Elyse said. “You good with scrambled?”

I eased the drawer shut, feeling untethered, a balloon floating away.

“Liv?” she asked. “That pill isn’t working already, is it?”

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Yes, scrambled is great.” I heard the click of the gas before the flame caught, the sizzle of butter in the pan on the stovetop.

I didn’t like enclosed places, which was part of the allure of the house: the openness around it; the multiple windows and exits; the rooms that flowed from one straight into another. But now I felt bound by the perimeter, like people were watching; like I shouldn’t leave without reason.

The box cutter wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Something breaking open inside me. All the possibilities of where it might be.

The box had arrived on Wednesday, and I’d used the box cutter to slice through the tape. I’d pulled out the contents, gotten swept away in the moment . . . I must’ve slid it into a different drawer afterward, my mind unfocused. Or left it inside the box by accident, as I replaced each item.

“Sit,” she said, pointing the whisk at me. What I really wanted to do was ask her to leave so I could go through the drawers one by one. Search the house top to bottom until I found it, and be sure. Because that was the problem: I could never be sure. Not until I had it in my hand.

Elyse slid the dish in front of me, and I continued to surprise myself, scooping up the eggs like I hadn’t eaten in days, practically ravenous. Even after all this.

“You might want to slow down a bit . . .”

I put the fork down, a memory surfacing.

Eggs on the tray in front of me. My mom beside the bed, arms crossed. The doctor at the foot of the bed. The sound of the fork against the tray, nothing satisfying, an endless bottom. “Slow down, Arden—”

The days after the rescue. Scenes flickering into focus—though incidents that might not be real.

It had been happening like that ever since I opened the box—this blurring of time.

I’d passed a group of nurses gossiping in the lobby the morning after the box arrived, and thought I’d heard my mother’s laughter—the unrestrained, high-pitched giggle that used to make people expect a child or a teen instead of a full-grown adult woman with a child of her own.

The same thing had happened around the ten-year anniversary. Flashes of memories that could not be mine:

Walk down the porch steps, and I’d see a little girl in a nightgown doing the same, the scene in sepia tones, like an old photograph. Ride the bus to school down the tree-lined street, and see a cluster of volunteers trudging through the thick foliage, searching for me. Close my eyes at night and see my mother with her hand to her neck as she called my name into the emptiness.

These memories did not belong to me. They were images from the news. Stories from the articles. From my mother’s book.

This was another truth I discovered back then: A story about you doesn’t necessarily belong to you. It belongs to the writer. To the witness. To the teller.

When they say: The girl from Widow Hills, remember? What they were reaching back for weren’t your memories—they were their own.

I was too young to really remember, and too much time had passed anyway, the trauma buried under so many layers that it existed only in the physiological reactions: the flutter of my pulse as the doors slid shut in an elevator; a ringing in my ears in the darkness of a movie theater before the first trailer kicked in; the cold sweat that came over me when someone stood between me and an exit—the need, the compulsion, to act.

It had happened the first time in the high school locker room, right after the ten-year anniversary: a girl standing between me and the only way out.

I thought it had probably happened again that time I was drunk in college.

Six years had passed since that last episode.

Now that box had kicked everything closer to the surface again, as if the past and the present could coexist on the same plane.

“I missed dinner last night,” I said, explaining.

“You’ve been through a lot. Adrenaline like that takes a toll. But it’ll make you sick if you eat too fast. And you want that painkiller to stick.” Elyse ate standing up at the counter, barely touching her food, gazing out the kitchen window, as if watching for something.

Like whatever she’d heard about was made real by her standing there—the fear transferring to her by mere proximity.

“What do you think happened out there?” I asked.

She stopped moving the food around her plate. “I don’t know. It’s pretty deserted out here, though.”