CHAPTER 15

Sunday, 8:15 p.m.

THE DAY’S ADRENALINE WAS wearing off, and I stood in the kitchen toying with the prescription bottle of pills made out in my name, weighing which was the bigger concern: what I might do while sleeping; or being unable to wake in a true emergency.

There was a killer out there. Someone who had been within sight of my house. Who had been so close, while I was sleeping.

Bennett had said I’d slept like the dead. When I’d woken, hours after taking the pill, I hadn’t moved an inch. But if the smoke detector went off, if someone broke in . . . would I be able to regain consciousness? Would I be able to run or fight?

I slid the vial beside the microwave and got to work installing the hook-and-eye latch.

I found a power screwdriver in my office, in one of my plastic bins of batteries, nails, and random tools. I checked each bin, just in case—no box cutter. I carried the stepstool from the kitchen and installed the hook-and-eye latch on my bedroom door, fully out of reach. To unhook it in the night, I’d need to pull the ladder from the closet, climb the steps, reach my hand up. So many extra steps, like I was trying to outsmart my subconscious.

There was always the window in case of emergency—if I couldn’t get the door open in time. No screen to slow me down. A drop onto patchy grass and packed dirt, a farther fall than from the living room window in the front, due to the sloping ground and the crawl space. But not far enough to hurt me.

The sound of the screwdriver must’ve blocked out the signs of the car approaching, or the footsteps on my porch, because I’d just dragged the ladder back into the closet when the doorbell rang. My heart was in my throat as I walked quietly into the living room, trying not to make a sound—though of course my car was out front; it was obvious I was home.

I peered around the living room curtain, caught sight of a car I didn’t recognize.

I couldn’t see an unfamiliar car or hear a phone ring anymore without remembering how it used to be. The press tried the friendly approach first, hoping for a quote or a photo, but got increasingly invasive. At the least: The person inside did not answer the door—with an accompanying picture of my property.

I remained perfectly still, tallying the layers of protection and options. Phone in my back pocket, with Detective Rigby’s number programmed; screwdriver in my hand; back door; windows.

The person on the porch took a step back, now in view of the living room window. I could see only his profile, but it was the man from earlier. Nathan Coleman.

I opened the door just as he turned away, hands deep in the pockets of his jeans.

“Hi, sorry,” I called to his back. Apparently, I was only capable of apologizing to him.

He shifted slowly, and in the twilight, he looked like a different person. Now that his glasses were off, I could see the hollows around his eyes, like his father’s. The lack of sleep, or the grief. What he’d been hiding earlier. It changed the angles of his face, made him seem open, more vulnerable.

“Hey,” he said, eyes lightly skimming over me, then lingering on my hand with the screwdriver. “Didn’t mean to make you nervous. I just . . .” He gestured to his car. “I tried your neighbor first, but he didn’t answer, either.”

“I didn’t hear you.” I held up the screwdriver, then placed it on the entryway table. “I was just fixing something.”

His eyes changed, almost like he was trying to smile. He shifted on his feet, standing on the other side of the doorway. “When I was here earlier, Detective Rigby, she said we’d need to get permission to get closer, that the . . . the material from the scene had all been gathered already, and that’s private property. I said no, I didn’t want to bother anyone. But here I am again, and I don’t know why. Why I keep driving past, why I stopped this time . . . It’s not like he’s still here, like it means anything . . . I don’t even know where it happened, exactly, and I’m trying not to trespass, I’m just trying to feel something.”

It took until he was halfway through his rambling for me to realize he was asking for permission. That I was the one who could grant it, allowing him onto my property. I thought about calling Detective Rigby, asking if she needed to be here, but I wanted to keep things light and unofficial, make myself a tangential component—in on the information but out of the picture.

“I can show you,” I said. “If you want to see?”

He tipped his head once, then started following me down the porch steps. We walked in silence toward the edge of the property, my stride somehow matching his, though he was solidly over six feet tall, and I was only a few inches over five feet.

The crime scene tape was gone, the police done collecting the evidence, but the spot where Sean Coleman had been found had a pull to it, like a black hole. Some of the dirt had been dug out around the body. What remained was a slight dip, upturned earth patted back down unnaturally. I stopped a few yards short, and Nathan did the same.

He was staring at it like he could see something in the emptiness. Something below this level. But all I noticed was the proximity to my house behind us: the bedroom window in sight; the light inside, and a straight view down the hall.

I didn’t belong out here, sharing in the grief of this man I’d never met and didn’t know existed until mere hours ago. “Take all the time you need . . .” I said, stepping back.

He turned to face me then. “We weren’t close,” he said, rooting me in my spot. Because I understood how sometimes that makes it worse. How you’re trying to feel a connection across the absence. I’d searched for it myself inside that sad box delivered to my front porch. Would I have felt more if I’d found the spot where she had died? I didn’t even know whether it had happened in a hospital, or a hotel room, or a house. Whether she was found alone on a street somewhere—or worse.

Maybe it was the uncertainty that kept pulling me back. The guilt about all the things I didn’t know and hadn’t asked.

“My mother died earlier this year, and I didn’t even know it,” I said.

He nodded once, never breaking eye contact.

“She was cremated before I could even claim her.” The guilt, coexisting with the knowledge that it wasn’t my fault, that it was for the best that I’d cut off contact.

I knew then why I was out here with him. Why he’d seemed familiar in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was something I recognized in myself. A separate exterior that presented as a hardness in him. But I could recognize its presence, something similar to my own. A shell formed out of necessity, of loss, of survival. And in that moment, it felt like we were two surfaces reflecting, an endless hall of mirrors.

“Do you feel safe here?” he asked, talking so low I had to lean in to hear the deep timbre of his voice.

But there was too much to sift through in the question. “I used to,” I said. Now there had been someone killed within sight of my bedroom window. Now I knew a woman had died from a gunshot wound in the house next door. Now I could hear the echo of crime scene tape fluttering in the place it used to be.

A cold dread seeped into my bones. I shivered, deciding whether to ask about the investigation—nervous about where that conversation could lead. But I had to get information. It was the only way to keep on top of the story, not let it take you over and consume you. I looked back toward the main road. “Did they find his car?” I asked.