“The short version is that the evidence didn’t hold,” Saffy said. “I’m giving you this information for your own safety. Please, just stay away from him.”
And Saffy left them like that, stunned behind the bar, her phone number clutched in Rachel’s hand. Call me if you need anything. As Saffy walked out of the restaurant, she memorized their shapes—two women, hurt but not fatally—and she knew that she was done. All these years, she had been watching Ansel Packer to see how his pain compared to her own. But it seemed Ansel had learned how to bury the past; it was time for Saffy to start her own digging.
*
That night, Saffy let herself into the station. Two o’clock in the morning, and the building was dead empty. The computers loomed, blinking asleep, her office pitch-dark. Saffy groped for her desk chair, calming with the immediate sense of authority as she sank into the leather. It was unprofessional, what she’d done. But if she couldn’t make a difference in this job—the job that had vacuumed everything else in her life into extinction, the job that seesawed between nightmare and rhapsody—then at least she could make a difference somewhere. The lump in Saffy’s throat cracked then burst. That old refrain echoed, inexhaustible. What do you want?
She wanted to be good, whatever that meant. As Saffy gazed up at the ceiling, hot tears burning down her cheeks, she prayed that the difference between good and evil was simply a matter of trying.
*
There would be no retrial. On the Monday they’d spent so long preparing for, Saffy gave her investigators the day off. Instead of clocking in at the station, instead of answering the many calls from the superintendent’s office, from Lawson’s defense attorney, from the hungry reporters, Saffy visited the cemetery.
Her mother’s grave was unkempt. Saffy brought flowers, but she hated how they looked, alive against the mossy gray headstone. As she crouched in the grass and placed the flowers against her mother’s name, etched permanent in granite, her mother’s voice returned to her, a rare and precious moment of clarity. You’ll see, Saffy girl. The right kind of love will eat you alive.
Rachel had called, her voice shaky but certain: She had sent Ansel away from the Blue House. His truck had disappeared from Tupper Lake. Where did he go? Saffy had asked. I don’t know, Rachel had told her. That would have to be enough. This obsession had held her in its grasp far too long. This case would remain open, a permanent mystery.
But Saffy knew her mother had been right—this had to count as some form of love. The kind that stalked, the kind that hunted. A love startled like a sound in the night. As Saffy knelt at her mother’s grave, forehead pressed to the gritty stone, the realization felt almost like a molting. Self to self. There to here. A wonder, a burden, this endless growing.
1 Hour
Your witness is here, the chaplain says.
Fifty-six minutes, and the dread is a sieve. A sluggishness has arrived, but it lifts with these words—everything lightens, your muscles stretching alert.
Blue, you say. She came.
She is older now. She does not want to see you. She does not want to talk. You will not lay eyes on her until she appears in the witness box—seven years have passed since that Blue House summer. She must be different. But it does not matter how Blue has grown. To you, she is eternally sixteen. To you, Blue will always be that teenager at the hostess stand, thumbs poked through the holes in her sweatshirt sleeves.
*
There was no big event. No life-changing reveal. When you think about the Blue House now, the simplicity brings a sort of devastation: there was only comfort.
There was only you, in the tall grass with Blue. She asked you questions about work, about school, about your favorite food as a child. She told you stories about her father, a man you came to know during those short bright weeks, a series of recounted memories. You could not believe that this girl was a result of the infant on the farmhouse floor, of the tragedy that had dogged you all these years. In her face, you found absolution.
It was easy, at the Blue House. You sat at the bar while Rachel and Blue closed up, telling stories about foster care, about Jenny, about the book you were writing. Your Theory. Blue fixed you a plate of homemade pie—the apple melted sweet on your tongue.
The truth feels stupid, in the shadow of tonight. Heartbreakingly simple. You had not known, until the Blue House, what you were capable of becoming. It was fleeting, ethereal. It was tragically uncomplicated.
At the Blue House, you were free.
*
Now, your last meal arrives.
You sit on the floor with your back resting against the bedframe, holding the tray in your lap: a slippery hunk of pork chop, a lump of mashed potato, a cube of neon green Jell-O. You cut into the meat with the side of your fork—it is the same meat they serve to the low-security prisoners at the rest of the Walls Unit. Nothing special. The infamous Last Meal is no longer a thing, banished years ago when requests got too outlandish and a new warden took charge. The meat splits easily. You stab a chunk, bring it to your mouth. It tastes rubbery, salty, unreal—you swallow, imagining how it will travel down your throat then into your intestines, how it will dissolve slowly along with the photograph. Whatever you eat now will not have the time to pass through you. It will decompose along with your skin and your internal organs, in a cheap cedar box paid for by the state, four and a half feet below the ground in an unmarked plot at the graveyard down the road.