Psyche

JANUARY, NOW

Photographs, like so many things in the world, do not last as long as they should.

This one, which Jane has worn in a simple oval locket around her neck every day since she was fourteen, is better than most others she owns, but even so has begun to fade. The small image blurs around the edges. The paper warps slightly, perhaps because she has pressed the tips of her fingers to it one too many times.

She can’t help it. She is still trying to memorize her sister’s features. She wants to burn them into herself. It isn’t enough to be able to recall her; she has to feel her.

But pictures are only ink on paper. They will turn to dust, too, someday, just as the people captured within them do.

Jane’s finger snags on the edge of the crucifix that hangs next to the locket. Jane catches her breath, as she usually does when she takes the time to truly appreciate the imagery of Christ in anguish upon the beams. It is sometimes a painful juxtaposition, carrying the weight of her parents’ God beside the weight of her sister’s soul. Jesus with his agony, Eloise with her frozen smile.

“Lord,” she whispers. “Forgive me.”

*

APRIL, BEFORE

Eloise had been dead for eleven years when the first governor granted a commuted sentence.

Jane watched the news coverage with a pit in her stomach and her fist against her mouth. Her parents sat next to each other on the couch—which they should have replaced years ago but which still bore the scars of Eloise burning a hole in the right arm when she tried smoking a cigarette at fifteen, so how could they, really?—her mother clutching at her father so desperately her knuckles turned bleached white. Her father’s lips pursed the way they did when he was so angry he might burn the world to the ground if only he opened his mouth to speak, because what he’d say would be a prayer to a vengeful father. It wasn’t that they knew the murderer on the screen getting a second chance at a free life; it was that they knew others would follow suit in beseeching their attorneys to submit the appeals to their respective governors. And now, there was a victory. Now there was an argument that had been made and won on the side of a killer.

“In a landmark decision,” the anchor said.

“Dear God,” her mother whispered. Her thin shoulders shook, and the thick cotton robe she wore couldn’t disguise the sob she tried to stifle.

They knew Eloise’s husband would ask. They knew he might win.

Jane felt the chains of love wrap around her throat. She lost her sister eleven years ago. Lost was a rather inaccurate term. Her sister had been wrenched from the world with violence, her blood spilled across the thin blade of a fish fillet when she got in a fight with her husband of three years.

(Jane had found her, once, in the first year while blood wept from her wrists. It’s okay, Jane, she said dreamily, while Jane wrapped the red gashes and tears fogged her sight. I meant to do it.)

I don’t know what happened, he sobbed before the jury. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.

I know what happened, Jane said in her victim impact statement, voice icy and clear. He got mad. They fought, like couples do. But now he’s here and she’s not. It wasn’t an accident. Husbands do not accidentally kill their wives when they’re fighting.

He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

It wasn’t a sufficient sentence. Jane would’ve seen him rot in there. She would’ve rather he burned. She would’ve relished a public hanging, or the chair, or even a crucifixion. Any of those were too great a kindness for him. What the jury didn’t see, because his attorney had it all suppressed, were the texts Eloise sent Jane in the early days of her marriage to Daniel. How she feared his temper. How she didn’t recognize this man in her home, he wasn’t the one with whom she had fallen in love. She didn’t know his temper when they were only dating. She had never heard his voice rise in anger the way it had so many times since the moment they said I do and vanished into a life private from the rest of the world, behind doors only he held the keys to.

He gets so angry, she said.

(He blamed her attempt on her miscarriage. The grief. Jane watched him across Eloise’s hospital bed after. Was the miscarriage a tragic twist of fate? God calling home a baby not yet meant for this world? Or was it a consequence of the temper of his father?)

Those messages stopped, eventually, despite Jane pressing the issue. She checked in, the way sisters do. But Eloise was the elder of the two and Jane didn’t want to betray her confidence, so she never told anyone. And when Eloise said to stop asking, Jane did. She never forgot, but she obeyed.

His attorney said she was lying.

Eleven years. Daniel’s trial took place one year after Eloise’s death. He served one year before the news broke around the world they there was proof of continuation of life after death.

Her mother and father had been less shocked than Jane had. Her dad took them to the church and almost fell to his knees in his haste to give thanks to God. Her mother couldn’t stop weeping. They knew, they knew, they knew their daughter was still out there somewhere, waiting for them in Heaven. Thank you, God, thank you for keeping their little girl safe until they could join her.

What if it isn’t Heaven? a little voice asked in the darkest pits of Jane’s mind.

Hush, she told it as she watched her parents press their lips to their rosaries. Let them have this peace.

But then came the suicides. Then came the murders. Then came the lawyers.

The darkness grew.

For ten years, her family suffered under the weight of the blade that took Eloise’s life. For one, they had an ounce of peace knowing that her killer would rot in a cell and she still had a grip somewhere in this universe. Now it was all gone.

Jane stood—jerked, really, a stiff, mechanical but explosive movement upward—and fled out the back door, into the truck she inherited from Eloise who inherited it from their dad. She had no particular destination in mind, only a fierce need to move, to try to outrun the darkness spreading from a shadowy corner in her mind through her veins. If she looked, she’d see the inky black spidering across her skin. She would become the darkness if she didn’t move.

It was a year ago that Jane started talking to her sister as if she was still there because, according to some scientists off the coast of Canada, she was. In some form, the wavelengths of her consciousness still functioned. According to them, everyone’s did, and they could prove it. Had proven it, many times over in fact. So Jane, in a haze of grief and shock and hope, spoke aloud, hoping her sister could hear her. She sometimes filled in the empty silences with the words she imagined might come from her sister’s mouth, too. . . or maybe just the ones she hoped would.

“You know Daniel’s going to file the appeal,” she said, almost spitting the words through her teeth.

Eloise’s silence was too much to bear.

“His attorney was really good. And since this guy in Connecticut won on the basis that the intent wasn’t there, and he really did love his girlfriend, and there’s proof she’s still ‘alive’ somewhere, what he did wasn’t technically murder, and certainly not a murder worthy of a life sentence.” She paused, waiting for a reaction from Eloise. The truck’s engine rumbled as Jane accelerated without consciously meaning to. Her knuckles strained against her skin, wrapped tightly around the wheel as if she imagined it might be Daniel’s neck instead. “He could do it, El. If anyone could convince a governor he’s not that bad, it’d be Daniel.”

Jane barked a laugh so harsh it was more howl. A passing car honked at her.

“I hate him,” she said. “I hate him for what he did to you.”

I should have left, Eloise answered mournfully.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

I knew who he was after that first year. I should’ve tried harder to get away.

“Don’t say that!”

Why not? I would’ve gotten to the same place. It just would have been on my terms instead. Is that really so bad?

Jane sniffed and ignored the burn in her eyes. “Fuck that, El. If anyone should be trapped on the other side of whatever veil is keeping you from us, it should be him.”

A long stretch of solemn silence ensued, and Jane’s heart pounded like she was running, like she was flying, like she was fighting for her life.

Jane felt this often during the trial. She wondered if Eloise did, too, as she fought for air around the knife embedded between her ribs. If she felt it when she turned to try and run from him.

The detectives said she made it three steps before she fell.

You know, Jane imagined Eloise might say, and her voice would be lighter, almost joking, if you’re really committed to him being on the other side, killing him now wouldn’t really be the same as murdering before, would it? You’d probably get a lighter sentence.

Jane blinked.

That was a joke.

“No, it wasn’t.”

The traffic light flicked from red to green, but Jane didn’t move. How could she? How could she when there was such a clear and simple answer she had missed for over a year?

A car behind her tapped their horn in annoyance at the delay, and with a start Jane resumed driving. This time she recognized the route, tried to focus on it to distract herself from Eloise’s ghost beside her, from the thought she had planted, from the instinctual urge to shy away from it. . . from the fact that there was more appeal in it than there was fear when she looked again.

She ended up in the parking lot of her family’s church. Saint Mary’s. Their parents had married here, the girls were baptized, Eloise confirmed, she and Daniel married, and then Eloise’s funeral was here, too. The walls of this church had seen every iteration of Jane and Eloise, from birth to death. From hopeful, happy daughters to angry, grief-stricken young woman.

When the whistleblower first changed the landscape of humanity last year, and Jane’s parents dragged her into the church, they weren’t the only ones. Many had come to give thanks to God for finally answering their prayers for proof. Non-believers came in droves to venerate themselves. Sinners begged forgiveness.

But Jane? Jane had been furious.

Her sister was gone. Her best friend, her favorite person, her confidante. Gone, and Jane had long since stopped asking God to heed her prayers, so she assumed that until she died, she would never see or hear from her sister again. Maybe not even then. Because the dead and the living are separate. Always.

And then they weren’t.

It wasn’t like anyone could reach them. Not truly. There was no communication, no interaction, no ability whatsoever to influence one another. The scientists, whoever they were, made it clear: they could only observe the presence of their electrical activity, active after a significant period past bodily death.

Gone. Where she couldn’t reach her. Where Jane had to miss Eloise knowing she could not touch her. Hear her voice. See her smile.

The suicides started to make sense to Jane.

The last time Jane came to church, she sat in silence. She refused to pray to the God who had done nothing but torment and taunt her family.

An hour passed with Jane staring out the windshield of her car, gazing up at the gargantuan son of God mounted upon his crucifix—why was this how the Catholics chose to immortalize him? in a constant state of sacrifice? —before a police cruiser pulled into the lot. He parked right in front of her and came to knock on her window. She rolled it down and offered a tight-lipped smile.

“You alright, Jane?” he asked, and she dimly remembered him being in the same grade as Eloise in school, four years ahead of Jane. Already on the force when she was murdered. He would’ve heard all about the case.

She looked back at Jesus on the cross, and then the empty seat beside her. Her hand rose to touch the locket she always kept around her neck.

“I’m lost,” she said, and he frowned.

“Jane,” he said.

“Metaphorically speaking. I think. . . I think I just needed a little guidance. But I’m scared to go in.” She gestured at the entrance, and he followed her gaze. “Did you see the news?”

She felt his eyes return to her face rather than saw him look at her. There is a weight in the gaze of people who have seen death and can spot it clinging to the living. His eyes had that weight. “I did,” he finally answered. “Let me walk you in.”

Jane only continued to stare, twisting the chain of her locket round and round her index finger. “This is where we had to say goodbye.”

“I know. I came to her service.”

“Did you? I’m sorry, I can’t remember. It was all a blur.”

“It’s okay. I stood in the back. You wouldn’t have seen me.” He paused. “Why didn’t you speak?” Jane’s eyes snapped back to his face and her hand went still. He immediately looked as though he regretted asking. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t my busin—"

“I couldn’t,” she said, but her tongue was leaden. “I wanted to, but I—I didn’t know what to say. Every time I tried to write something down, it was about him.”

Her voice cracked, and she cut herself off before he could hear the murder confession behind her teeth. She tamped down the urge to say the damning words anyway, and sought out a different answer, one he perhaps would understand. “I didn’t know what to say then,” she said, and loathed the furious tears that crawled their way traitorously up her throat. “And I don’t know what to say now.”

His badge glinted in the light of the nearby streetlamp and drew her attention to the nameplate on his other breast. Harken. That’s right. Joe and Asher Harken. Twins. Asher died in the first rash of suicides to rock their small town last year.

So much loss. So much pain. Had it been better for them all to know? Were they better off in the dark? She was haunted by the knowledge she would never have a sure answer.

“God knows what’s in your heart,” Joe told her. “You don’t have to say anything.”

Jane lifted her eyes to his. A sweet blue, like the sky, very endearing and All-American. Like he should have been a poster boy for baseball, or maybe become a Ken doll. “What if I don’t even know what’s in my heart?”

He looked away, offering her a view of his sharp jaw, locked tight as he considered her question. “Well,” he finally said. “I guess He’ll help you figure it out then.”

She nodded, slowly, and sighed. “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

So Joe pulled away—only enough to make sure he no longer blocked her vehicle with his own, he didn’t leave yet—and Jane did not go into the church. She pulled out of the parking lot, and despite the rain that began to fall and quickly turned into a downpour that sent her into obscurity, she could have sworn she felt the eyes of Jesus on her the whole way home. When she finally got there, and tiptoed through the silent house

(almost silent, she could hear her father crying softly in what had once been Eloise’s room)

she still felt a prickle on the back of her neck like someone could see her. And, despite what she had said to Joe, she crawled into the guest bed, stared at the ceiling, and spoke to God instead of Eloise.

Unlike Eloise, she could not imagine what He would have to say to her.

She said, “God,” and hesitated. And then,

“Help me.”

*

MAY, BEFORE

Her grief group expressed similar levels of rage and despair, if not more than what Jane felt. She knew some of them from around town, and they knew her, but because of the nature of the group no one ever really spoke to one another outside the four walls of the empty classroom they claimed as their own every other Tuesday evening. Jane had missed a few meetings after the news covered the commutation. This was her first return, and everyone was still as angry as they must have been in the beginning.

There was so much gratitude in knowing she wasn’t alone in that. Some days she could have sworn she was twisting, contorting, transforming into some sort of a monster herself. For a long time, she thought of Daniel only in those terms: monster. Demon. Inhuman.

But then she recognized her own burning fury, how she could so easily snap on the people around her because of some insidious thing inside herself. Terror tempered it down, but the thought had already been planted. Maybe Daniel wasn’t always angry. Maybe Daniel wasn’t always a man capable of killing his wife.

What did that make Jane?

“There’s no humanity left,” a father said, the words dripping with bitter venom. “They took our children from our arms, but because they assume the electrical activity or whatever bullshit is actually trace proof of life after death, it’s not that bad. Killers aren’t that bad because they didn’t kill them all the way. As if they wouldn’t have if they didn’t know how to.”

“My therapist,” a widow said, “told me that maybe some of them wouldn’t have.”

An immediate rumble of dissent shimmered around the room, and Jane drew back, stiffened in her seat, and rearranged her features into a scowl. The widow held up a hand.

“That was my reaction, too. But he said the point he was trying to make was not that murderers are good people or that they deserve the benefit of the doubt. But for ourselves—myself—maybe that’s the only way we can start thinking about it to find some peace in something we have no control over. We have to imagine that, for those of us whose loved ones weren’t planned killings. . . Maybe it really could have been an accident. Maybe they really are sorry and wouldn’t have done everything possible to remove their souls permanently from everywhere.”

They lapsed into silence, but it wasn’t one of contemplation or agreement. It held a miserable tinge, an edge slick with poison. Jane knew there were some topics they skirted because there would never be total agreement, such as the validity of the death penalty, the philosophy of an eye for an eye acting as the only true form of justice. This, it seemed, would be another. But they needed each other.

Grief is something everyone experiences some time in their lives. But the grief born of violence? It’s a unique brand. Until one experienced it, they couldn’t understand it.

This group was all each other had in a world of people who didn’t understand.

“I bet they’d offer a lesser sentence or a new kind of plea for revenge killings,” the father said suddenly. “I bet I’d get off easy.”

“Well, not now that you said it out loud,” Jane answered, “you didn’t give us plausible deniability that it wasn’t premeditated.”

They laughed. All of them did, some soft chuckles, others a mere exhalation of amusement. The father laughed loudly. It all startled Jane. Her eyes, previously trained on an ant scrabbling in a disoriented zig zag near her shoe as if it was lost, snapped up to find the focus of the room suddenly on her, and she realized they thought she was joking. She pushed a smile to her lips, sheepish and innocent, and avoided their eyes.

Maybe they weren’t as angry as her.

The rest of the meeting became listless, the same circling they always did. There were tears, there was commiseration, there were confessions of black thoughts. Usually those were about hurting themselves, not the world. And tonight was no different. Other than the bereaved father’s single comment, no one else suggested taking another’s life. She supposed that even if they wanted to, her joke/not a joke had landed somewhere in their subconsciouses. Even if it was a remote possibility. . . better to keep it a possibility than air the frustration aloud and end their own life in the process.

They closed with the serenity prayer. This never ceased to amuse Jane. It was a bleak humor, but humor nonetheless. How ridiculous that they used the same prayer in a grief group that addicts did in their programs.

Although, there was an argument to be made that she was addicted to her sadness. In many ways, she didn’t know who she was without it. If she stopped being changed by her sister’s death, if she let it stop affecting her. . . what became of Eloise then? So she kept the suffering close, wrapped it around her as a blanket, or her sister’s arms. Even on the days she didn’t really feel the weight of it dragging her down, she reminded herself: You are breathing in a world Eloise isn’t. Wasn’t it a betrayal not to?

“Amen,” she echoed just a half-beat behind the rest of the group as the prayer closed their meeting, and she cleared her throat and looked away to avoid the discerning eye of the father who had spoken earlier. She busied herself with her bag.

An involuntary yelp escaped her lips when she turned to rise and almost collided with someone standing over her. Her eyes traveled upward but didn’t even reach her face before she knew it wasn’t the father, who might’ve been the most likely candidate for who would want to talk to her. No, to her surprise it was the widow.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Jane. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just wanted to check in with you. You missed a few meetings lately, and we just. . . We wanted to make sure you were okay.”

A slow smile snaked across Jane’s face. It wasn’t funny, exactly, but it was. So many of the conversations everyone had now were coded. We wanted to make sure you were okay meant they thought she had joined the droves of people finding solace in coils of rope, pills, knives, bullets, carbon monoxide. Just wanted to check in meant she saw past the surface-level emotions typical of someone still struggling to mourn.

“I’m okay,” Jane said. “I’m, you know. Still here.”

The widow cocked her head. “Better here than the alternative, right?”

Jane stared up at her. “Do you think so?”

Her lips pursed as she considered Jane before she finally sank into the hardbacked plastic chair beside her, dragging it just a little closer so she and Jane were less than a foot apart. “I’m Molly,” she reminded Jane, and Jane nodded.

“A mugger killed your husband.”

Molly inclined her head in confirmation, but otherwise did not acknowledge that. “Do you think it’s better where they are?”

Jane’s eyes drifted to the cross on the far wall, hanging above the clock and the flag. Not a cross, actually, another crucifix. The classroom they hunkered in belonged to the town’s only Catholic school. “I don’t know, I guess it depends on where they are.”

Molly’s eyes never left Jane, but she seemed to guess what she was looking at. “You mean heaven or hell.”

Jane studied Molly. She wasn’t old, really, certainly not old enough to be a widow. At least not by natural causes. She was maybe forty, forty-two. Lines had started appearing at the corners of her eyes, bracketing her mouth, and dark circles marred her undereye. She had thin lips, but a straight nose that turned up at the tip. Despite the betrayal of the circles to indicate how tired she was, her cognac brown eyes were lively, sparkling in the poor fluorescence. And there was a lack of any scarring, either from acne or anything else, which Jane couldn’t claim herself. She must’ve been very pretty when she was younger.

She didn’t look old. But Molly carried herself and faced the world with such a steely, unflinching determination that she seemed like she’d seen more years than she truly had. There was a knowing about her.

She looked at Jane like she knew something about her that Jane did not know herself.

Jane shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s what I mean. I don’t know that I believe in heaven or hell.”

Molly nodded, slowly. She didn’t answer immediately, but then rolled up her sleeves. She still didn’t say anything, just kept staring. It took Jane a minute before she realized she was waiting for Jane to notice something.

When her eyes fell to Molly’s arms, her breath caught, and she was seventeen again, crouched in a pool of Eloise’s blood and wrapping her sister’s wrists with dish towels and tying a tourniquet below her elbow with her own shirt.

So Jane had been wrong. Molly did have scars.

“I didn’t believe there was more,” she said. “I attempted before. . . before everything came out. I was just a kid. Sixteen. The goal was to stop existing. Had I known then what we all know now, I wouldn’t have seen it as such a great option, I don’t think. Since there’s more. I didn’t want there to be more. I wanted it to stop.”

A cavernous ache throbbed from the center of Jane’s chest and the shockwaves rocked through the rest of her body. “Yeah, well. Maybe people think it’s better.”

“But you don’t,” Molly said. She rolled her sleeves back down, and Jane forced her eyes to return to Molly’s face, and swallowed around the knots tangling in her throat. Molly didn’t smile, but she didn’t look away in embarrassment or fear or discomfort, either. “You don’t believe in heaven or hell, not really. So whatever you’re thinking? That there’s some punishment in killing the person who killed your sister, or peace for you if you kill yourself? It’s not true, Jane. We don’t know what else there is. We only know what we have here and now, and I know that’s just—I know that’s not even remotely enough when you’ve lost someone you loved. But it’s what we have. It’s all we have. For all we know, they’re just stuck in space, somehow, watching us. For all we know, they can’t communicate with each other any more than they can communicate with us.”

Jane thought, dimly, of the mediums who had rocketed to elite status after people started trying to contact the dead. How many of them were scams? Lies sold to desperate people? And everyone was desperate, truth be told. Everyone missed someone. It left a feeling of unease in Jane whenever she saw a new medium announced in town, touting their services as a vessel to reach the deceased. They were preying on people’s pain and taking advantage of people’s hope.

Clearly Molly didn’t believe in what they did. Neither did Jane. But she wanted to. God, she wanted to.

“I know,” Molly said, and her voice shook a little, and she fiddled with the band she still wore on her left ring finger even though Jane recalled her husband had been dead for thirteen years, “it feels wrong to move on and live a life when they didn’t get to. But we have to. And you have to know they’d want us to.”

“And if there is more on the other side?” Jane asked, and her lips barely moved. If she allowed herself to express any emotion, she’d crumble beneath it.

Molly smiled a little, and she looked years younger. “Then we get a little more time with them later. And we’ll have so much to tell them.”

Her eyes burned, and she blinked to no avail. The tears rose anyway and Jane glared at the water-marked ceiling to try and avoid their fall. “Did your therapist tell you that?”

A laugh burbled past Molly’s lips, and it undid, as if by magic, some of the pain writhing within her. “No, no. My dad said that to me when my mom died. I asked how he survived it. He said he had to keep going so he’d have as much to tell her as she would him when they finally saw each other again.”

One tear escaped. It tore a jagged, salty path down Jane’s cheek, and she sniffed and nodded, wiped it away with the back of her hand. She counted the speckled dots on the ceiling for a minute and lost count at fifty-two. When she finally found enough composure to look at Molly again—that kind of patience, the kind that enabled her to sit with someone so quietly while they battled their demons in silence must have taken her years to master—she offered a brittle smile.

“Thank you,” she said. “For checking on me.”

“Any time,” Molly said. “I mean it. If you ever want to get together outside of group or you need someone to talk to or just want to hang out with someone who gets it, I’m around.” She reached for her bag and pulled out a pen and semi-crumpled receipt, which she smoothed as best she could against her thigh. She scrawled out a phone number and passed it to Jane, who hesitated before she took it. “Text me any time.”

She smiled, patted Jane’s leg, and stood to leave.

Jane waited until she was gone. Then she crumpled the receipt in her fist.

Molly meant well. Molly possessed a great deal more wisdom than Jane likely ever would. But she hadn’t really done anything other than tell Jane something Jane had already considered.

Any path she took, she was trapped.

Any path she took, it would be a lonely one.

Jane looked again at the crucifix. Was this how he felt? Was this how everyone felt at the end?

*

JUNE, BEFORE

It disarmed her when the man who helped her change her tire asked for her number. She didn’t think she seemed particularly desirable in that moment, sweaty in the warm June sun, cursing as she tried to position her jack under her truck, hair disheveled from her lying on the dusty ground so she could see better.

He laughed when he found her struggling. He didn’t mean to, she didn’t think, he just couldn’t help himself. She knew she looked ridiculous. Her surly response seemed to endear him, though. So when her spare was on and her tire—he found a long nail protruding from it, the culprit for her misfortune—rested safely in the bed of her truck, he asked for her number.

She eyed him distrustfully.

“I don’t really date anymore,” she said.

“Neither do I,” he said with a smile. It was a perfect smile, a smile that his parents probably sank a couple thousand dollars into when he was a teen. He leaned against her truck, one arm up on the edge of the bed. He glanced at her tire lying in it. “But any woman who tries to change her own tire and cusses like a sailor while she does it instead of calling triple A is a woman I think I want to get to know a little better.”

“Why? She’ll probably just cuss at you, too.”

His smile broadened. “Even better.”

Jane crossed her arms over her chest.

“It doesn’t have to be anything serious,” he told her. “I’d just like to buy you a drink. A drink. If you want to leave after that it’s fine.”

Jane bit the inside of her lower lip and dug her left toe of the ratty tennis shoes she wore into the dirt.

“Where are you coming from, anyway?” he asked suddenly, while she contemplated his offer. “Nothing’s really out this way other than the prison.” He paused. “You have a man in there?”

Jane scoffed. “Yeah, I visit my baby daddy every other week but I leave the baby in the truck. We’re madly in love. He likes it when I dress like this,” and she gestured to her body, clad in an old, too-large t-shirt from a band she no longer listened to and the denim she had cut into shorts herself years ago. “Really lights his fire.”

His eyes danced. “It’s working for me, so I get it.” She rolled her eyes and he chuckled. “So not visiting your future husband. Just out here for shits and giggles?”

He gestured around them, as if she didn’t understand they were surrounded by empty plains, waves of rippling green buffalo grass on all sides, growing with abandon. A few trees dotted the scenery here and there, but otherwise the landscape was unobstructed by anything, manmade or natural. The sky and the land fused on the horizon. Aside from the stretch of highway they found themselves on, there really was nothing out here.

It was an unusual place for two people to meet.

“Maybe driving clears my head.”

“Yeah, you seem pretty clear-headed right now.”

“Well, if I didn’t have to change a flat it would’ve been more ideal.”

“Sure, of course.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“Oh, God sent me to find you.”

She glared at him.

“Alright, so I found the line with you.” His smile was undeterred by her wrath. He gestured behind him at the beautiful, deep red motorcycle he pulled up on. “Riding clears my head. Lightyears better than a drive.”

“Until someone hits you.”

His eyes danced wickedly. Blue. Like the sky. “The risk’s part of the fun, darlin’.” She saw the moment the idea occurred to him, like lightning splitting a clear day. Sparks. “Can I show you?”

She took a step backward. “You expect me to get on the back of a bike with a strange man in the middle of nowhere? When I’m not even remotely dressed for it, and I don’t have a helmet?”

“You can wear mine, and I’ll go slow. You’ll be safe with me,” he promised.

Her reasoning for not dating anymore was something discernible by a Psych 101 class. Her view of marriage and relationships was tainted. Sure, her parents hadn’t murdered each other. But.

But his smile was disarming. His eyes looked like freedom. She had stared at the prison from the side of the road for an hour, imagining what Daniel’s life inside was like, and wishing it wasn’t a life at all. The drive back had done nothing to soothe the boiling under her skin.

Prisons don’t require walls and barbed wire. Some exist entirely in the mind.

“My name is Jane,” she said, and pulled her phone out of her back pocket and brandished it at him in threat. “And I’m going to share my location with my dad, who owns more guns than most people do shoes.”

He nodded. “Desmond,” he offered. “And noted.”

While she worked on sharing her location

(This, too, was something her sister passed on to her. A fear that no one would ever find her in time. That she had to make sure her family knew where she was, always, because it was the worst feeling to not know where someone they loved was.)

Desmond retreated to his bike and retrieved his helmet. It was at least a cruiser, so he wasn’t necessarily someone whose primary joy in riding was the speeds he could reach. He shed his leather jacket, too—which exposed his arms, knotted with muscles, and the white t-shirt he wore beneath, which tugged up enough for her to glimpse a tattoo on his ribs— and extended it to her when he gave her the helmet. “I’m not planning on crashing, but just in case.”

“Oh, good, I’ll just destroy my legs.”

“What is life without a little pain?”

Jane made a face but didn’t object. Who was she but a hypocrite to tell him he was wrong? She shrugged into the jacket, which was far too large, but it offered a comforting warmth and felt a little like a shield against the world. It smelled like leather, of course, but she caught hints of him, too. Like a hardware store, a little bit. Sawdust. Metal.

He caught her sniffing the collar and she flushed.

“Sweaty?” he asked.

“Not too bad,” she said. “I’ll live, I guess.”

He grinned and shook his head and helped her put the helmet on. He threw his leg over the seat. He waited for her to settle behind him, and when he felt her weight, he reached back to grab her arms and wrap them around his waist.

“Hold on tight, alright? At least until you get a feel for it.”

She obliged without answering, pressing her chest against his back, and locking her hands together across his midsection.

“Ready?”

“A bit late to change my mind,” she answered, and he huffed a laugh before he turned the engine and eased them off the shoulder.

And then they flew.

They might have left her stomach behind, and for a moment she all but forgot how to breathe, let alone think. But then there was only the rush of the air across her skin. The rumble of the vehicle beneath her, rattling her bones. The warmth of Desmond’s body against hers.

She laughed, and Desmond half-turned his head so she caught the crooked tilt of one half of his mouth turned up in a smile. He accelerated ever so slightly, and she whooped.

He didn’t take her far, and they never saw another soul on this secluded stretch of road, and true to his word, he never went faster than a couple miles below the speed limit. But by the time she clambered off, she understood why he rode out here. She understood why he seemed far more cheerful than she did in a world where the darkness was not only finding footholds, but winning ground over the light every day.

“So,” he said when he accepted the helmet back and caught sight of the wild smile she could feel plastered across her face, “about that drink.”

She rolled her eyes but programmed her number into his phone. His smile remained wide while he walked her back to her truck. He opened the door for her, which she stared at until he removed his hand, at which point she closed it and then opened it again herself. He laughed, and he waved to her in her rearview mirror until she left him behind. Her heart hammered all the way home, and her own smile refused to dissipate.

Still, as she pulled back into her parents’ driveway, she glanced at the empty seat beside her. Habit, as they said. Much harder to kill than people.

Be careful, Eloise whispered.

*

JULY, BEFORE

“Sorry, I’m chronologically challenged.”

“I’m aware,” Desmond said cheerfully, without looking up from the paper. She cranked her neck to read the headline on the front page—

Murder-Suicide: Man Slays Wife, Two Children in Springview—

and jerked upright when she realized what it was. Because, though the headline was insidious itself, it was the article that began on the right-hand side of the paper that made her sick.

First Appeal in Fairfield Under Way

She cleared her throat, shook herself—shook the headline from her shoulders—and pulled the chair across from Desmond out to sit. He straightened and set the newspaper aside, but his eyes lingered on the same headline that had jolted her like an electrocution. She busied herself with situating her backpack so she wouldn’t have to answer to his heavy gaze.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, and kept his voice carefully neutral.

Part of her softened. He knew the landmines of this situation already. He always handled her outbursts of tears and rage with grace. But another part of her sparked with annoyance, too. She hated that he tiptoed around it, that he never offered his thoughts or comfort or advice unless she practically begged him for it.

“Not particularly,” she said. “Nothing’s changed.”

The last week of May she had arrived at her parents’ house after a date with Desmond. Her mother sat sobbing at the kitchen table, her head in her hands. Her father stood at the back door, a sliding glass glimpse into the world outside, and he stared sightlessly. His hands clasped together into a taut fist behind his back. For a second, the same fear that had chased her all the way to the bathroom in the courthouse after she had given her victim impact statement thrilled through her now, and she had the wild thought,

Someone died.

Of course, someone did. Eloise did, eleven years ago. And her parents were thrown right back into the deepest throes of their mourning not because someone else had died, but because the attorney who had charged Daniel for her murder called to tell them what they had known was coming but which shouldn’t have. Daniel’s attorney filed an appeal to the governor for a commuted sentence.

“Freedom” wasn’t what they offered, nor a pardon. Daniel didn’t need that, though. No one could give him back the time he served, so what he wanted now was grace. Only reduced time. They might reduce the remainder of what he needed to serve.

Best case scenario, for him, was that he would be eligible for parole next year. That was Jane’s family’s worst case.

Jane froze when they told her. The news staggered out of them in fragments punctuated by jagged breaths and hiccupped sobs. They were lost in the grief of remembering the trial, she knew. Remembering how hard they fought to show that Daniel was a monster, not a remorseful widower. But Daniel had a clean record. Eloise, except for her attempt, never had any emergency room visits. No police calls were received for disturbances at their residence. No complaints about noise. Her limited circle could not recall him ever even raising his voice, let alone a hand against her.

It had been Jane’s statement, or so the attorney thought, that swayed the jury and the judge. Her vehement belief in her sister’s unhappiness and Daniel’s role in it.

Jane would’ve given anything to not be standing in that room with their monstrous sorrow as they told her Eloise’s death, while tragic, might not be enough to keep her killer behind bars anymore.

But they had heard nothing more. Until yesterday, when the attorney had called to warn them that news of Daniel’s plea was breaking, and they would likely hear about it in the local news soon.

Desmond watched her now, those clear blue eyes clouded by emotions she didn’t care to examine.

“Do we have a destination in mind today, or are we just riding?” she asked, and pulled his water across the table to drink.

He tracked the movement of her fingers painting patterns in the condensation while he answered. “I thought I could take you to the mountains. There’s this view up there—”

“Jane?”

The voice held a familiarity Jane couldn’t place until she turned around. Molly. Jane hadn’t gone back to the grief group since May, so she expected reproach when she registered who was speaking to her, but there was none to be found in Molly’s expression. Instead, her eyes darted between Jane and Desmond with a bizarre level of excitement.

“Hi, Molly,” Jane said and offered a half-hearted wave. She glanced back at Desmond, who smiled his usual face-splitting smile to Molly, but waited for a cue from Jane for whatever else he should say or do.

“Long time, no see! How have you been?” Molly’s group—a handful of other women, all carrying books—glanced back when they realized they’d lost her on the way to their table, but none of them returned to get her back. Molly didn’t seem perturbed.

“I’ve been—"

(Raging. Free. Happy. Drowning.)

“You know. Still kicking.”

Jane tried to ignore how aware she was of the fact that Desmond stole his water back and looked pointedly out the window.

Molly’s always-discerning eyes dissected the expression on her face, and her exuberance dampened a little at whatever she saw. “I do know. I—I heard, you know. I saw this morning.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the paper discarded on their table. “I prayed for you.”

Such a cleaving statement. So simple, so sincere, so frustrating. Jane momentarily couldn’t breathe, and when she said “thank you” it was almost a wheeze. She didn’t tell her it was likely wasted.

“Mol!” One of them women at the table down the row called out to Molly and waved her over. Molly held up one finger to them before turning back to smile sympathetically.

“It was nice to see you, Jane,” she said. She glanced at Desmond. “Sorry, I’m Molly. Just an old—”

“Friend,” Jane said. “Molly was a good friend to me after Eloise. This is Desmond. He’s, ah. . . He’s a good friend now.”

Jane chanced a glance at him again and was relieved to find his easy smile back in place. “Nice to meet you.”

“You as well. I’ll let you two get back to your day. I’ll see you around, Jane?”

Jane wanted to say no. Every time she saw anyone from the grief group, Jane felt compelled to hide. It shouldn’t have felt shameful, but it was, somehow. Knowing people had seen her so vulnerable. She died a little every time they looked at her in public with those sympathetic, I-know-what’s-inside-you eyes. She didn’t want to see Molly again. Didn’t want to see any of them again.

Be nice, Eloise murmured in her ear.

Jane pushed a smile to her lips.

“Yeah, I’ll see you around.” She waved again, and Desmond immediately teased her when she turned back around.

“A good friend, huh?”

Jane rolled her eyes. “Shut up.”

He kept smiling, and they resumed their planning. This was why she liked Desmond. He knew things about her, but he didn’t reduce her to them. To him, she was a good time. For her, he kept her anchored in the now. She couldn’t get lost in the future and she didn’t drown in the past. Even her parents thought she seemed more cheerful these days, though her father disapproved of their meeting. “Any man who doesn’t make you feel safe enough with him to be completely alone with him isn’t a good enough man.” Jane rolled her eyes at that, too.

Desmond was easy to be around. Easy like breathing.

When he was gone, it was harder. Everything came back three times heavier than when she left it.

Jane glanced over her shoulder, once, as they left. She saw Molly laughing.

She wondered what it was Molly saw in her with Desmond that had excited her so, only for that excitement to die in the next second.

*

AUGUST, BEFORE

“Get out!” Jane shrieked. “Get out of my apartment!”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Jane!” Desmond’s shout chased the sound of his plate crashing to the floor. Jane clutched her steak knife with a death grip and brandished it in Desmond’s direction. “Can you act like a normal person for five fucking minutes?”

“You’re the one who threw your glass at my head!” She tried to edge around him, keeping her back to the wall and the knife pointed outward, but between the glass on the floor and his hulking form blocking the threshold to the living room where her phone was, she was cornered. Her rising panic felt like acid in her throat. Burning. Strangling. She could hardly think straight. “Leave, Desmond! I don’t want you here! Get out!”

“I wasn’t trying to throw the glass!” He raked his hands through his hair and—

and his shirt tugged up and she glimpsed that tattoo again, that tattoo, hands clasped around a rosary, clasped in prayer, clasped in supplication, God, she had loved that tattoo the first time he took his shirt off and smiled at her while she stared in awe—

and his wild eyes gleamed in frustration and anger. Did he not know how intimidating he was? How threatening his broad body suddenly seemed when it boxed her in and prevented her from fleeing?

She had loved his body when it was above her, his bulk pressed against her while he was inside her. He curled around her when they slept, and she found peace there she hadn’t for eleven years.

But she had forgotten. That height, that weight, that strength. There was always danger in that.

“Desmond! Get. Out.”

A loud pounding on her front door almost tore a scream from her throat, but it also served to distract Desmond.

“Jane? It’s Officer Harken. We got a call from your neighbors about some noise. Can you open up and let me know you’re alright?”

Desmond stood frozen, eyes fixed on the door. Jane hesitated for a split second and then lunged.

She barely made it past him—and he did, he reached to stop her, threw his arm out like he might catch her or cast her to the ground, whichever would stop her faster—and when she wrenched the door open, Joe Harken stood there in bewilderment for only a half-second before he stepped in with his hand on his gun.

He extended one arm to partially shield Jane behind him, but he kept his focus trained on Desmond. But Jane had seen. She saw him catalog the panic bleeding from her face, the glass on the floor, the animalistic look in Desmond’s eyes.

“What happened?” Joe asked.

“I just want him out of my apartment,” she pleaded. “Please just make him leave.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” Desmond said, and venom laced the words. “She got some bad news and she was upset and I got frustrated with her attitude—”

“Did you hurt her?” Joe asked. Then, over his shoulder, “Did he hurt you?”

“No,” Jane whispered, and her lips trembled. “No, he didn’t, and you don’t need to arrest him, I just want him out. Please.”

“You heard her,” Joe said, and it was a tone she had never heard in him before. Full of authority. Threat. “Time to go.”

“Fuck you,” Desmond said. But he obeyed, with one glare cast at Jane before he stalked past Joe and got on his bike.

Jane almost folded to the floor.

Joe hesitated for a minute. But then he guided her to her couch and eased her down. “Where’s your broom?” he asked.

Jane blinked and stared through teary eyes at the gun at his hip, the words barely registering in her mind. “What?”

“Your broom. Where do you keep your broom? I’ll clean all that up while you calm down.”

“It’s, um. It’s in the hall closet.”

He vanished, and she was left staring at the spot where he had stood. She heard the trademark squeal of her closet door opening, then the tinkle of glass skittering and scraping across the tile in her small kitchen. The soft brush of the bristles against the ground.

“What happened?” he asked, finally.

“He got mad at me,” she said.

(He gets so mad.)

“I had an attitude, I guess, I told him I didn’t want to listen to him talk about work anymore tonight, and he got mad. He was in the middle of taking a drink when I told him I needed him to be quiet for a little bit, and I was standing at the sink, and he got up and he—he threw the glass at the sink. But it hit the cabinet next to my head.”

She’d been washing the knife. That’s why she had it. And when she turned to wield it as a weapon, he swept all the dishes on the table to the floor, forcing her backward to avoid cutting her feet.

“No,” Joe said, softly. “I meant what bad news did you get?”

“Oh.”

Jane reached up to close her fist around the locket resting against her chest.

“The governor decided Daniel deserves a commuted sentence. Since he’s already served almost ten years, in five months. . . he’s eligible for parole.” A hollow laugh clawed its way out of her mouth. “He’s been a model prisoner. And now he’s going to be out in January.”

Her laughter came again but morphed halfway into a sob.

*

SEPTEMBER, BEFORE

Confession always seemed like a bit of a cheater’s way out. Catholics knew they could pray their way to salvation if they sinned, so why stop sinning at all? Express the proper level remorse, and all would be forgiven.

Even so, Jane found herself in the vestibule with her forehead against her hands and not enough words to even begin to know how to pray for forgiveness.

“Father,” she said, and had to stop.

He waited in silence with her, but it wasn’t like the silence with Molly, all those months ago. This one smothered. This one choked. This one carried God’s holy wrath.

“I don’t know how to ask forgiveness for something I haven’t done,” she finally whispered.

“There is hatred in your heart?” the priest asked. She almost laughed. How many Catholics contemplated hurting the people around them for him to reach that conclusion with such swift surety?

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, there is hatred in my heart. But it’s. . . it’s pain, too. I don’t know what to do. I want to—I want to hurt someone.” She wants to do more than hurt him; she wants him to suffer. She wants him to scream. She wants him to beg God for mercy and then assure him that he will never see God in this world. “But even if I did, the world is different now. Would—would—would it even matter? Does it even carry the same weight?”

The priest, in his profound wisdom, tracked the leaping patterns of her thoughts with ease. “’Thou shalt not kill’,” he reminds her. “It is a sin, regardless of what mortal men design in legislation. Souls, once removed from this plane, are gone forever, and that fact has not changed just because science claims there is more.”

Tears dripped from Jane’s eyes onto the vestibule floor. Her knees screamed. “What about an eye for an eye?”

The silence this time was longer. Did he realize, now, what was being asked of him? What kind of woman knelt here, begging for help?

“It is not meant for revenge,” he said, gently. “Love your enemies. ‘Love each other as I have loved you.’”

He helped her, then, perform the act of contrition. He joined her while she prayed, though she fumbled through each prayer and stammered the words through her tears.

When she departed, she looked at Jesus on the cross, larger than life behind the altar. Love each other as I have loved you.

Was that it? Was the deepest love always self-immolation? Always sacrificial?

“Please,” she whispered to him, because her soul felt no lighter, nor cleansed, “tell me what to do.”

But Christ looked down at her and said nothing.

*

OCTOBER, BEFORE

The world blurred around her. She hardly worked, her hours at the library dwindling to almost nothing. She spent most of her time locked in her apartment, reading her bible, trying to pray, watching the news.

Her parents called often, but her return calls grew scarcer.

She lied. It’s cold.

I’m sick.

It’s just the breakup is a little harder on me than I thought.

I’m feeling better, just busy with some projects for work.

She was afraid to see them in person. She was afraid they would realize they were watching the death of their other daughter in slow motion.

Because that’s what it felt like she was doing. Dying. Every breath was a little harder to take. She wanted to talk to Eloise, and she tried, but Eloise’s answers were fewer and further between, almost impossible to hear. There were no answers in prayer, and she could not bring herself to go back to the church in search of any more help. And where else could she go?

She could barely bring herself to grocery shop. Today, her scant list included things she could eat despite having no appetite. Crackers, canned soup, tortilla chips, cheese cubes. She rounded the corner to get some bottled water, and almost collided with Desmond.

Terror wound its way through her veins with the kind of speed reserved for the most lethal predators. She froze, and so did he.

“Jane,” he said, and before she could think to say anything herself, he blurted. “I’m sorry.”

(I didn’t mean to.)

“I was such an ass that night. I don’t know—I shouldn’t have done any of what I did. I’m so sorry.”

Jane stared at him, her heartbeat a hummingbird’s wings battering her ribs with a hundred beats a minute. His eyes—they didn’t look like freedom anymore, they looked like ice, they looked like broken glass on the floor—searched her face for any signs of life, but she still didn’t respond. A woman appeared behind him, and she reached for him, one hand touching his lower back. She smiled a polite, confused smile at Jane.

“Hello,” she said.

Jane still didn’t answer.

“Jane, this is my fiancée,” Desmond said, and she heard the familiar neutrality, the minimization of words that felt like bombs. “Laura. Laura, this is Jane.”

“Oh,” Laura said. “Oh.”

What did he tell her? That Jane was crazy? That she got mad and drew a knife on him one night and then lied to the cops? That she was verbally abusive? Poor Jane, it’s probably because of what happened to her sister, you know, but trauma isn’t an excuse to inflict trauma on others.

Desmond shifted awkwardly, and Laura cleared her throat. “Okay, then. Just, ah, take care of yourself, okay?” He held Laura’s hand as they walked past her and turned a corner to disappear, and only when they disappeared did Jane heave a ragged breath. She could’ve sworn blood dripped into her lungs with it.

She left the store without buying anything. She was still sitting in her truck, hands clenched around the wheel, when she watched them leave together.

And she could not help but wonder: after their marriage, would she be reading about their deaths? Next year? In three years? When they had children?

Murder-Suicide: Man Slays Wife in Fairfield

*

NOVEMBER, BEFORE

Her parents said, “We’re choosing joy.”

More accurately, her mother started therapy and found that there was no changing anything that happened, before or since Eloise’s murder. They couldn’t will the cosmos into letting Eloise come back. They couldn’t persuade God to lower the veil. Eloise was gone. Daniel would be free soon. What could they do? What could they do?

They could live.

Their vow renewal, for their twenty-fifth anniversary, was witnessed by the snow, and a quarter of the people who were at their wedding. Her mother wore a dress that made her look younger, lighter, untouched by crippling loss. Her father smiled, laughed, danced. A framed photo of Eloise sat on a table at the church’s front with a single candle lit in front of it, but they otherwise did not acknowledge the loss of their eldest daughter.

The world shouldn’t function the way it did. They danced in the same reception hall behind the church where they mourned Eloise after her service. The same room that had possessed such a solemn air in memoriam of a stolen life now teemed with joy and laughter, and Jane wanted this, wanted it for her family and for herself so badly she could weep.

But she was so far away from them.

She might have been a satellite lost in space, untethered from the place in orbit where she belonged. She drifted alone in a cold, stark, vast darkness. She watched from a vacuum of misery the light of the people she loved burn, and no matter how she tried, she could not get back to them.

They could not, it seemed, even see her.

On the same table that once displayed a catalog of Eloise’s life, from infancy to her last days, there now sat a stereo and vases of flowers blooming despite the winter.

Her dad danced her mom past it, and they did not even glance at it.

Jane, unmoored, adrift, silently screaming, couldn’t stop looking at it, and she clenched her hands into tight fists while she imagined smashing the vase to the ground, scattering those pretty little flowers through shards of glass.

*

DECEMBER, BEFORE

Jane passed this store a million times over the years. She knew her father had been here before, and it was where Desmond’s father worked before he retired. But Jane never stepped foot inside.

She didn’t really know what she expected. More safes, probably. But most of the guns were mounted on the walls and displayed in glass cases at waist height. It seemed like it would be alarmingly easy for someone to simply grab one and leave if they really wanted to. Of course, she reminded herself they weren’t loaded. And guns were useless without ammunition.

Her shoes squeaked a little with every step on the linoleum, and she cringed. It seemed too loud. It seemed like she was drawing the focus of the entire world to her, but no one glanced at her. There were three other men in here, and one man behind the counter. She was the sole woman.

She tried not to think too hard about that.

The man behind the counter caught sight of her as she edged her way up to the furthest corner of the display case and peered down at the line of pistols within. He strode over with a smile. His white mustache was so thick his smile almost got lost in it. “Hello, looking for something specific today?”

Jane shook her head. “No, ah, just. . . I just wanted something small for self-defense.”

He clicked his tongue in understanding and looked down at the display case. Jane recognized the names. Ruger. Smith and Wesson. Winchester. Colt. Glock. Her father had several.

“Well,” he said, “how small are we talking? I have a subcompact Glock that I keep having to replace because it’s real popular for women. It’s a bit smaller than the usual make, but it still carries ten in the magazine plus one in the chamber. It’ll fit in almost any bag you choose to carry or it’s a good concealed carry, it’s lighter weight than some of the normal pistols, and it gives you plenty of room for grip. She does have a little bit of a bite on the kickback, but I think it’s a good tradeoff for the rest of the features.”

“I think that sounds perfect.”

He didn’t seem bothered by her easy acquiescence. This was a smaller city, she supposed, in a largely conservative state. Many people probably came through as beginners and accepted his guidance as readily as she did.

How many of them were liars, too?

It only took a couple hours. Her background check came back clear, of course. She paid for it without thought to the cost. She bought two boxes of ammunition despite knowing she would hardly need even one. The other men around her talked guns while she waited, talked government, talked hunting, talked death, talked faith. She made herself as small as possible, and they didn’t spare her a moment’s attention. Why would they? Who was she?

Someone’s sister, that was all.

She didn’t want it to be hard to buy the firearm. She needed it as soon as possible. But by the time she walked out, new horror filled her. How many other people bought those weapons with such ease with the intent to kill someone they loved? What if Daniel had walked in there all those years ago? How much sooner would Eloise have died, had he felt so inclined?

Hypocrite, Eloise muttered.

Jane took the gun back to her apartment, loaded it, and kept it on her nightstand, next to a picture of Eloise and Jane on Eloise’s wedding day. In it, Jane kissed Eloise’s cheek, and Eloise’s face was split wide by her smile.

God, she missed her.

The only other item on the nightstand was a calendar for the next year. January had one date circled. Under it, Jane had written only two words.

Daniel released.

*

JANUARY, NOW

His parents hug him as if his soul isn’t stained with blood. As if they didn’t create a killer. His mother cries, her tears ruining her mascara. His dad claps him on the back when they embrace.

Jane sees so much of them in him. He has his mom’s mouth. The shape of his dad’s eyes. His same stick-straight brown hair. Her easy smile rests below his lips.

Jane fingers with the clasp of her necklace and tugs it from around her neck. She pops open the little doors to study the photos inside of the girl who Jane has grown to look just like.

Photographs, like so many things in the world, do not last as long as they should.

This one, which Jane has worn in a simple oval locket around her neck every day since she was fourteen, is better than most others she owns, but even so, has begun to fade. The small image blurs around the edges. The paper warps slightly, perhaps because she has pressed the tips of her fingers to it one too many times.

She can’t help it. She is still trying to memorize her sister’s features. She wants to burn them into herself. It isn’t enough to be able to recall her; she has to feel her.

But pictures are only ink on paper. They will turn to dust, too, someday, just as the people captured within them do.

Jane’s finger snags on the edge of the crucifix that hangs next to the locket. Jane catches her breath, as she usually does when she takes the time to truly appreciate the imagery of Christ in anguish upon the beams. It is sometimes a painful juxtaposition, carrying the weight of her parents’ God beside the weight of her sister’s soul. Jesus with his agony, Eloise with her frozen smile.

Her attention shifts to the hard metal of the gun in her lap. With her free hand, she traces the barrel of it, her fingertip flirting around the trigger guard.

Did Jesus go so willingly to his death because he knew he wouldn’t be alone?

Did God kill His only son out of necessity, or mercy?

Her hand tightens around her necklace.

“Lord,” she whispers. “Forgive me.”