That was the moment I stopped testing and started acting, because Courtney’s shaking hands had turned my private terror into something with a witness, and I could no longer pretend to myself that I might be imagining it.

I drove to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office and I asked to speak to someone, and eventually I was sitting across a desk from a detective named Lucia Hernandez.

She was a calm, unhurried woman with careful eyes, and she let me talk.

I laid all of it out for her, everything, and I could hear how it sounded even as I said it, like the plot of a soap opera, like exactly the kind of story a grieving woman’s broken mind might invent.

The scar shaped like a fishhook.