I’m sorry. I’ve thought about your daughter a lot.

Daniel read it four times and then sat very still, because he had already known the answer since roughly the second sentence and had been hoping to be wrong for eleven days.

Patricia would never have released her own text.

Scott had been in a bar and then a car and then a house, screaming.

There had been exactly one person downstairs that night who had a phone with the family thread on it, a reason, and — Daniel remembered this with total clarity, because he had watched it happen on a live feed from a hospital room — the presence of mind to stand in front of six cameras and say tell them what you wrote.

He drove to Melissa’s apartment in Ballard on a Saturday morning.