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“Came forward.”

“Yeah.”

The sound waves of the voice-note app jump up and down as we speak. Not by much, we’re quiet enough, but it’s still a threat. A constant reminder of our deal.

I’ve never told anyone this before.

I was ten when I turned on my father. A fifth grader. In school, we were learning how to round decimals and reading bigger chapter books. Gym class was jump rope and flag football.

“He was getting sloppy,” I say. “Messing up. Not enough to get him caught, but enough that I was noticing.” To keep myself from picking at my cuticles or pulling at my hair, I start to rip up my napkin. Every shred goes in a small pile. “Couldn’t tell you why. Maybe he wanted to be one of those cool serial killers that leaves clues for the cops. Or maybe the cops had always been too close for comfort and I’d never noticed.”

“The cops were onto him?”

“Oh, absolutely the fuck not. Don’t give them any credit.” One time, Dad got a girl drunk to take her back to the penthouse, and a cop stopped him while he was trying to get her into the car. Not only did the officer let Dad go, he apologized for intruding on his evening. “But they’d been getting … close-er. Close enough. Finding more bodies, or parts of bodies. And when Jane Doe went south, I realized we were going to get caught eventually.”

Felicity whispers, “You couldn’t have saved her? Let her go?”

Well, no.

Dad was in the bathroom when Jane Doe broke her ankle, slipped the cuff, grabbed the keys, and bolted for the door. I threw myself into her and put a knife in the back of her leg because that’s where the tendons live. And after Dad came out of the bathroom and finished the job—storming away from her strangled body, mad as hell—I snuck out to the elevator, stepped into the lobby with my dead-eyed doll’s face and bloody hands, and asked the concierge if she could call the police, please, and hide me behind the desk until they arrived.

If Jane Doe had gotten out, she would’ve told the story. And if I wanted to make it past ten years old, it couldn’t have been her. It couldn’t be anyone who knew what I’d done. It had to be me.

I answer with “And let her talk to the cops?”

Felicity’s face screws up with that same pain from when they were looking at the photographs. Their hands are shaking now. “Oh my god.”

“If you’re going to call me a monster, get it over with.”

“Don’t you feel bad?”

I don’t like that it’s the choice I had to make, but if you asked me to choose between saving someone I don’t know and saving myself, in what universe wouldn’t I have picked myself?

“Good question,” I say.

Felicity looks sick, and it’s vindicating. It sucks, doesn’t it? It’s horrible, isn’t it? Living with this written into your muscle memory and carved into your neurons. You can’t get away from it, no matter how many times you scrub your skin raw or pry the invisible dirt from under your nails.

Felicity says, “I would’ve killed myself if I were you.”

I choke on my water. “What the fuck?”

They stammer, trying to put their thoughts together. “I—I feel bad about everything. I’m shit-scared all the time and nothing ever makes sense and life feels like one big—I don’t know.” Their voice doesn’t get louder, but it gets rapid-fire, every syllable clipped and desperate. “It feels like I’ve got my head in a Saw trap twenty-four seven, and I know it’s going to go off eventually because it always does, and it happens over and over no matter what I do. One of these days, I think it’s actually going to kill me.”

I imagine them in a stereotypical Saw trap—the reverse bear trap clamped onto their head, or facing down the vat of acid to grab a key before their rib cage gets ripped open. The pain is inevitable, and every time it comes, it doesn’t even free you. It just resets.

They get it, I realize.

I don’t know the extent of what happened to them, but they get it. That’s exactly what it’s like. That’s what it’s felt like my entire life.

And I hate myself for thinking it. Empathizing with Felicity Keating isn’t my fucking job. My job is to find Jane Doe and end this blackmail situation without getting my shit wrecked.

But they get it.

“So how are you alive?” they rasp. “I don’t understand.”

I grab the photos. I don’t want to have this conversation anymore, and it’s time to stop being a coward. “You don’t have to.”

Forensic photographers take a lot of pictures, so I didn’t steal all the ones related to Jane Doe’s case. I left behind shots of the penthouse building, and overviews of the elevator with my red fingerprints on the number buttons. I skipped blood splatters and close-ups of the discarded nylon rope Dad used to saw through her throat, but I did nab one of the knife I used to open her leg.