So we would pack one bag — documents, the diary, a change of clothes, nothing that would take time — and we would leave the next day while she was out at her standing appointment, and we would drive straight to the state police, not the local station where she golfed with half the force, but the state police in the city, and we would put the diary in front of a detective along with the decades-old file on his father’s death, and we would ask them, finally, to look again.

Julian kept the diary inside his jacket that whole day and night, against his chest, as though he were afraid it might vanish, might be scratched out like my face in the photograph, might be laundered away at dawn like the sheets.

And I lay awake beside him in that house for what I swore would be the last time, listening to it breathe around us, and I thought: tomorrow.

Tomorrow we get free.

I did not know yet that Victoria had never in her life left a thing to chance, and that a woman who keeps a key to every room keeps one to the possibility of losing, too.

There was one thing I did do that last night, one precaution I took almost without deciding to, and it turned out to be the thing that mattered.