It was not the language of a woman in love with a difficult man.

It was the language of a project manager describing a timeline.

Teresa, on the sofa beside me, closed her eyes as she listened, and I understood that she had heard versions of this before, in that house, alone, with no one to tell.

That, I think, may be the loneliest thing in the whole account, and the one I return to when I want to remind myself why any of this mattered.

For weeks, Teresa had been carrying the knowledge of what Vanessa was, had overheard the plans and sensed the danger, and had had no one to bring it to, because the one person who most needed to hear it was the one person Vanessa had most carefully turned against her.