The Roses of May (The Collector Trilogy Book 2) by Dot Hutchison (2)

Paperwork will, if left unattended, multiply exponentially, much like rabbits and wire coat hangers. Scowling at the newest stacks on his desk, Special Agent Brandon Eddison can’t help but wonder how they would look on fire. It wouldn’t take much. Just a flick of a match, the snick of a lighter, the corners of one or two pages in the middle so it would catch nice and evenly, and then all the papers would be gone.

“If you set them on fire, they’ll just print them off again and you’ll have all of it plus the paperwork about the fire,” says a laughing voice to his right.

“Shut up, Ramirez,” he sighs.

Mercedes Ramirez—his teammate and friend—just laughs again and leans back in her chair, stretching into a long, slightly curved line. Her chair creaks in protest. Her own desk is covered in papers. Not stacks. Just covered. If he asks her for any specific piece of information, she’ll find it in under a minute, and he will never understand how.

In the corner, facing their angled desks, is the lair of their senior partner, Supervisory Special Agent in Charge Victor Hanoverian. To Eddison’s disgust and amazement, all the paperwork on that desk seems to be done, sorted into colored folders. As the leader of their intrepid trio, Vic has more paperwork than either of them, and he always has it finished first. Thirty years in the Bureau does that to a person, Eddison supposes, but it’s a terrifying thought.

He looks back at his own desk, at the newest stack, and grumbles as he reaches for the top pages. He has a system, one that baffles Ramirez as much as hers unnerves him, and despite the height of the pile, it doesn’t take him long to move the papers to the appropriate columns at the back of his desk, sorted by both topic and priority. They align neatly with the back edge and corners of the surface, alternating portrait and landscape within each stack.

“Has a nice doctor ever talked to you about that?” asks Ramirez.

“Has A&E ever staged an intervention about yours?”

She snickers and turns back to her desk. It would be nice if, just once in a while, she rose to the bait. She’s by no means unflappable, but she’s strangely impervious to teasing.

“Where is Vic, anyway?”

“On his way back from a deposition; Bliss asked for him to be there.”

He wonders if he should point out that, three and a half months after they rescued the surviving girls from the burning Garden, she’s still using the Butterfly names, the names the victims were given by their captor.

He doesn’t point it out. She probably knows. The job is easier, most of the time, if they can put everything in neat little boxes in their minds, and who the girls were before they were taken is harder to integrate.

He needs to get to work. It’s a paperwork day, or mostly, and he really should make at least one of those piles disappear by the end of the day. His eye falls on the colorful tower of folders that lives on the back-right corner of his desk, growing over the years with more folders but no answers. That stack never disappears.

He leans back in his chair and studies the two framed photos atop the squat filing cabinet that holds his office supplies and blank forms. One is of him and his sister on a long ago Halloween, one of the last times he saw her before she got snatched off the street on the way home from school. She was only eight years old. Logic tells him she must be dead. It’s been twenty years, but he still finds himself examining any twenty-something woman who resembles her. Hope is a strange and fickle thing.

But then, so was Faith, strange and fickle, back when she was just his sister rather than a missing-child statistic.

The other photo is newer, just a couple of years old, a souvenir from the most disturbing and unexpected day trip he’s been on that didn’t involve work. Priya and her mother dragged him on a number of strange sightseeing trips during the six or so months they lived in D.C., but that jaunt was the stuff of nightmares. He’s not even sure how they ended up in a field full of massive presidential busts. They did, though, and at one point Eddison and Priya had climbed up onto Lincoln’s shoulders, both pointing to the very large hole in the back of the statue’s head. Realistic? Yes. Intentional? Judging from the battered condition of the rest of the twenty-foot-tall busts . . . no, not so much. There are other pictures from that day—safely tucked away in the shoe box in the crawl space in his closet—but this is his favorite. Not because of the thoroughly discomfiting bust of an assassinated president, but because it’s the one where Priya surprised herself by grinning.

He’s never known the Priya who grinned without thinking. That Priya shattered just days before he met the girl who grew from those broken pieces. The Priya he knows is all sharp edges and snarls and smiles that slap you in the face like a challenge. Anything softer—anything kinder—is accidental. Her mother may see some of that softness still, but no one else does, not since Priya’s sister was reduced to photos and facts in one of the colored folders on the back corner of his desk.

Eddison is fairly sure he would never have become friends with the old Priya. He’s still startled to be friends with this one. She should have only ever been the sister of a murder victim, a girl to interview and feel sorry for and never really know, but in the days after her sister’s murder, Priya was so damn angry. At the killer, at her sister, at the police, at the whole fucking world. Eddison is very familiar with that kind of anger.

And because he’s thinking about her, because it’s a paperwork day after a string of bad days fighting to contain the media on the Butterfly case, he pulls out his personal cell, snaps a picture of the framed photo, and texts it to her. He doesn’t expect a response—the clock tells him it’s only nine where she is, and without school to wake her up, she’s probably still burrowed in her blanket burrito.

A moment later, though, his phone buzzes with a reply. The photo is a long shot of a red-brick building that should be stately but just looks pretentious, one stretch of brick covered by rusting iron lattices that probably hold ivy in the warmer months. Tall, medieval-looking narrow windows are scattered through the brick.

What the hell?

His phone buzzes again. This is the school I almost got stuck going to. You should see their uniforms.

I knew you were only doing online classes so you could stay in pajamas all day.

Well, not ONLY. You know the headmaster protested when Mum told him we wouldn’t be enrolling? Told her she was doing me a disservice by allowing me to slide by with an inferior education.

He winces. I can’t imagine that went well.

I guess he’s used to flexing his dick and getting what he wants. Mum’s dick is more impressive.

A weight drops onto his shoulders and he flinches, but it’s just Ramirez. Her concept of personal space is drastically different from his, in that he actually has a concept of what it should be. Rather than argue, because it never seems to do any good, he tilts the screen so she can read it.

“Flex his . . . Eddison!” She flicks his ear hard enough to hurt. “Did you teach her that?”

“She’s almost seventeen, Ramirez. She’s perfectly capable of being crass all on her own.”

“You’re a bad influence.”

“What if she’s the bad influence?”

“Who’s the adult?”

“Certainly neither of you,” observes a new voice.

They both cringe.

But Vic doesn’t remind them that personal cells aren’t supposed to be out during work hours, or that they have things they really should be doing. He just walks past them, the smell of fresh coffee wreathing around him, and calls back over his shoulder, “Tell Priya hello.”

Eddison dutifully taps it in as Ramirez slinks back to her desk. He laughs at Priya’s instant response. Awww, did you get detention?

What are you doing awake, anyway?

Wandering around. The weather finally turned.

Isn’t it cold?

Yes, but it is no longer snowing, slushing, or otherwise shitting cold wet things from the sky. Just seeing what’s here.

Call me later. Tell me what’s there.

He waits for her affirmative, then slips the phone back into the drawer with his gun and badge and all the other things he’s not supposed to play with when he’s at his desk. In the damn-near unrelenting slog of horrors that is his job, Priya is a prickly spark of life.

He’s been in the Bureau just long enough to be grateful for that.

Huntington, Colorado, in February is freaking freezing. Even layered up enough to feel three times my size, the cold has a way of creeping between fabrics. We’ve been here a week, and this is the first day it’s been almost nice enough to explore.

So far, it all feels very much like any of the places we’ve lived in the past four years. Mum’s company shuffles us all over the country so she can put out fires, and in three months we’ll be leaving again, maybe even for good, so she can take over Human Resources in the Paris branch. Not that France is necessarily final, but I think we’re both hoping it will be. Priya in Paris has a lovely sound. In the meantime, Huntington is close enough to Denver for Mum to sensibly commute, far enough that it’s supposed to feel more like a community than a city, according to the company agent who let us into the house our first day.

After five days of slushing, it snowed over the weekend, leaving the lawns fluffy and white and the borders nasty and grey. There is very little uglier than plowed snow. The roads are clear, though, and all the sidewalks are tinted blue from the salt. It feels like walking over the remnants of a Smurf slaughter.

I shove my hands into my coat pockets as I walk, partly for warmth on top of the gloves, partly to keep my fingers from itching for a better camera than my phone’s. I left my good camera at the house, but Huntington is a little more interesting than I expected it to be.

Passing the closest elementary school reveals a squirrel winter home set up to one side of the playground; it’s basically a high-stilted chicken coop painted bright red. There’s a hole in the bottom so the squirrels can get in and out, and the blinking red light of a camera inside that must let kids in the school keep an eye on the rodents through the winter. Currently, a few are sleeping peacefully on what look to be semi-shredded quilts and sawdust. Yes, I totally peeked. It’s a squirrel home.

A mile or so on, there’s a bare space set back from one corner of an intersection, too small to be a park of any kind, but with a gorgeous wrought-iron gazebo in the middle of it. Sort of a gazebo—it doesn’t have a floor, just the posts digging down into frozen earth, but for all the strength of the metal, the supports are intricately wound together and the almost onion-top looks lacy and delicate. Like an outdoor wedding chapel, but surrounded by fast food joints and a stand-alone optometrist’s office.

Starting a wide loop back home, I have to cross a seven-road intersection, half the roads one way only and all the signs pointing the wrong way. There isn’t a single car in sight on any of the seven roads. True, it’s only half past eleven in the morning, and most everyone is at work or school, but I get the feeling this intersection is braced only by those drivers filled with resignation at the inevitability of certain death and doom.

I take pictures of everything anyway, even though they’ll mostly turn out crap on the phone, because taking pictures is just what I do. The world seems a little less frightening, somehow, if I can keep the camera lens between me and everything else. Mostly, though, I take pictures for Chavi, so she can see the things I see.

Chavi’s been dead almost five years now.

I still take pictures.

Chavi’s death is how I met my FBI agents, and they are mine in an important way, Eddison and Mercedes and Vic. She should have been just another case to them, my big sister just another dead girl in a file, but they kept checking in on me after. Cards and emails and phone calls, and at some point I stopped resenting the reminders of Chavi’s murder, was grateful that as we moved from place to place, I had my strange group of friends in Quantico.

I walk past a library that looks more like a cathedral, complete with stained glass and a bell tower, and a liquor store bookended by law offices specializing in DUIs. A little bit farther on, there’s a plaza anchored by an enormous twenty-four-hour gym on one end and an educational afterschool care facility on the other; between them are seven different types of fast food. Weirdly enough, I kind of like that, the contradiction and messiness, the awareness that our intentions tend to go fuck themselves and our vices are right there waiting.

A much bigger plaza—two stories and with way more elaborate decoration than any outdoor shopping center should have—houses what has to be the nation’s fanciest Kroger. A sign outside advertises a Starbucks inside, but there’s another Starbucks in the plaza and one just across the street, and it’s supposed to be a joke but so, so isn’t.

I should probably get lunch, but I try not to eat out on my own if I can help it. It’s not a health thing; give me takeout with Mum, and I am all for it. It’s the on-my-own bit. After a few years of trying to balance what my body needs against what my emotions insist I need, I’m still not great at it. Sometimes—mostly only on bad days, anymore—I still eat myself sick at the realization that Chavi isn’t here, she’s not here and it just hurts so fucking much in a way that doesn’t make any sense, because anything that hurts this much should be able to bleed out, should be able to be fixed and it can’t be, so eating Oreos until I’m bloated and cramping and vomiting just gives a way for the pain to make sense.

It’s been a few months now since I teetered over that line I drew for myself and collapsed in front of the toilet—and Oreos definitely don’t taste good the second time—but I’m still . . . aware, I guess, that my control isn’t what it should be. Mum has always been significantly less concerned about the weight than about the eating-myself-sick part, but between the two of us—her iron will and my relief at her iron will—we’ve managed to stabilize things so I’m no longer swinging wildly between the worrisome extremes of bony and round.

That my current weight makes me look more like Chavi than ever . . . well. On good days, it’s a shudder and carefully avoiding pictures, or mirrors larger than a compact. On bad days, it’s needles crawling under my skin and my fingers twitching for Oreos. Mum calls me a work in progress.

I head inside the Kroger. I’m pretty sure I can’t feel the tip of my nose, so a hot drink wouldn’t be the worst thing. If I don’t eat until I get home, it’s harder to get myself in trouble.

The barista is a tiny, sparrow-like lady who must be eighty if she’s a day, her lavender-tinted hair poufy in a Gibson Girl bun with bright purple bobby pins. Her back and shoulders are bent and her hands arthritic, but her eyes are sharp and her smile welcoming, and I wonder if she needs this job or if she’s just one of those people who gets a part-time job after retiring because the house or her husband gets too irritating over long periods of time.

“What name, sweetheart?” she asks, Sharpie in hand as she reaches for the cup.

“Jane.”

Because watching people butcher Priya sucks.

A few minutes later, I have my drink. There are tables and chairs packed together here in the corner of the grocery store, and there are speakers in the ceiling pumping out some corporate CD of smooth jazz, but it’s all but buried under the sounds of the rest of the store: squawky calls over the intercom, crashes of carts and cans and boxes, screaming children, the pop rock soundtrack—it’s chaotic and clashy and makes the whole café-in-a-grocery-store thing a bit weirder.

So I head back outside, into the cold and the shred of a breeze that’s picked up, and wander off into the parking lot. I came from the back of the plaza, but the road fronting it will take me straight home, and it’s probably about time I headed back.

Instead, I freeze at the sight of a strange little pavilion. It’s up on a grassy island, one of several splitting the parking lot into sections, the iron covered on three sides by what looks to be heavy white canvas. Space heaters, coils glowing cherry-red, hang from the struts, safely above the heads of a collection of mostly older men in similar ball caps, dark blue or black with yellow embroidery, all of them layered up against the cold that slams in from the rolled-up side of canvas. They’re seated at stone picnic tables, boards and pieces spread between them. It shouldn’t be anything, but it is, because it’s achingly familiar.

Nothing looks quite the same as old men gathering for chess.

Dad and I used to play chess.

He was terrible at it and I pretended to be, something that bothered him a lot more than it did me, but we played every Saturday morning in the park near home, or in the adjacent empty church during the long Boston winters. He sometimes wanted to play during the week, too, but there was something about the Saturday tradition that appealed to me.

Even after Dad, I keep looking for chess gatherings everywhere we move. I lose every game, at least half of them on purpose, but I still want to play. Everything else that was Dad is neatly packed away, but convincing others I suck at chess, that I get to keep alive.

A car door squeaks as it opens nearby, pulling my attention away from the old men and their boards. A few feet away, a young woman, maybe midtwenties, sits in the driver’s side with a lapful of knitting, and she smiles at me. “You can go talk to them, you know,” she says. “They don’t bite. At least not with teeth.”

I’m not very good at smiling anymore—it comes off a little frightening—but I try to muster an appropriately friendly expression. “I didn’t want to intrude. Do they let others play with them?”

“Sometimes. They’re pretty particular about it, but it can’t hurt to ask. My grandfather’s up there.”

That explains the knitting. Thank God—a parking lot Madame Defarge would be pretty creepy.

“Go and ask,” she urges, her thumb absently petting the loops of red yarn around her pinky. “The worst they can do is say no.”

“You encourage everyone who stops and stares?”

“Just the ones who look lonely.” She closes the door before I have to come up with a response to that.

After a few more moments of standing there like an idiot, an ache building in all the parts of me that aren’t frozen through, I walk up onto the grass and into the mostly warm pavilion. The players all stop their games to stare at me.

Almost all the men are older, clearly veterans, based on the operation and unit designations on their hats. Chess parks are common places to find vets, so while I don’t know all the operations, I know enough to lump them into groups. Most of these guys served in Vietnam, a few in Korea, a couple in Desert Storm, and one very old man, bundled in scarves and blankets and seated nearest the space heaters, wears a hat with Operation Neptune embroidered on it, the thread faded to a weary mustard.

Holy shit.

This man stormed Normandy Beach before my grandparents were even born.

One of the Vietnam vets, a saggy, pouch-faced man with a bulbous, broken-veined nose that suggests chess may be the way he keeps himself from day-drinking, scowls at me. “We’re not looking for donations, girl.”

“Wasn’t offering any. I was going to ask if you allow others to play with you.”

“You play?” He doesn’t sound like he believes me.

“Badly, but yes. I look for a place to play wherever we move.”

“Huh. Thought that’s what you young people use the Internets for.”

“It isn’t the same.”

The oldest man clears his throat, and the others all turn to look at him. Every group has a hierarchy; groups of veterans are really no different, and actual rank aside, World War II trumps all. This man lived through hell and has carried its scars with him a lot longer than anyone else here. That kind of rank doesn’t retire or get discharged. “Come here, please.”

I walk around the table and perch on the tiny sliver of bench sticking out beside him. He studies me—for what, I’m not sure—and the sickly sweet smell of his breath makes me wonder if he’s diabetic, if he’s actually okay sitting out here in this weather, space heaters and layers aside. His skin looks parchment thin, folded over itself in soft wrinkles, unevenly discolored with age and wear and thin blue veins spider-webbing his temples and under his eyes. Thick, pale scar tissue knots around one temple, digging back over and behind that ear. Shrapnel from Normandy? Or something else entirely?

“You’ve got your own war, don’t you, girl?”

I think about that, letting the question beneath the words take shape. It takes the shape of Chavi, all that rage and sorrow and hurt I’ve carried since her death. “Yes,” I say eventually. “I just don’t know who’s on the other side of it.” A war needs an enemy, but I’m not sure anyone can sabotage me as well as I do myself.

“We’ve all wondered that a few times,” he agrees, his eyes flicking to the other men. All but one are watching us; the exception is studying his board with a faint frown and the dawning realization that his king’s about to be cornered. “What’s your name, then?”

“Priya Sravasti. Yours?”

“Harold Randolph.”

“Gunny!” Most of the men cough into their hands. Only one refrains, and he doesn’t look like a veteran. He’s younger, softer, and there’s something in his eyes—or rather, something not in his eyes—that says he doesn’t belong the way the rest of them do.

Gunny rolls his eyes. He slowly peels off a knit glove to reveal a second below, this one fingerless and a yellow as faded as the letters on his hat. His hand shakes slightly as he lifts it—a palsy, I think, more than cold—and he touches the tip of my nose with one finger. “Can you feel that?”

I almost smile, but I don’t want to scare him, make myself less welcome. “No, sir.”

“Then get on home for today, and come back whenever you want. We don’t play much on weekends. Too many folk.”

“Thank you, sir,” I tell him. Impulsively, I drop a kiss on his cheek, soft whiskers tickling my lips. “I’ll be back.”

The bulbous-nosed man snickers. “Look at that, Gunny’s got a new future ex-wife.”

Most of the others nod at me, acknowledgment rather than friendliness, but that’s okay. I have to earn a place here, show them I’m not just bored or flighty. I stand up and walk along the back of the pavilion, soaking in the warmth before I head home, and glance at the man at the far end of the tables, the one who doesn’t seem to belong. He’s not wearing a ball cap, just a knit cap pushed back far enough to show light-colored hair that’s impossible to describe as blond or brown.

He smiles blandly at me.

“You look familiar,” I blurt.

His smile doesn’t change. “I get that a lot.”

No shit. He doesn’t look like anyone, so he must look like nearly everyone. There isn’t a single distinguishing feature on him, nothing to say yes, I’d absolutely recognize him out of context. He isn’t handsome, he isn’t ugly, he just . . . is. Even his eyes are a murky, indistinguishable color.

And his smile doesn’t change the look of his face. It’s strange, that. Smiles change you, the tilt of your cheeks, the shape of your mouth, the crinkle around your eyes. But his face doesn’t look any different than it did before he smiled. It’s not that it looks fake exactly, it just doesn’t look . . . well, natural. But let’s be honest, chess parks are a haven for the socially awkward. Maybe I should just be impressed he’s making eye contact.

I nod, still feeling somewhat unsettled, and head home. I’m not feeling the cold as much, which is less a sign of the day warming up than a hey-idiot-get-inside-before-you-get-frostbite warning.

Once in the neighborhood, I stop at the large overhang sheltering the wall of mailboxes for our street. There’s even a trash can chained around one of the posts for all the junk mail. In my more sentimental moods, I miss our mailbox in Boston, with the brightly colored handprints across the cheerful yellow surface. Dad didn’t want to put his handprint—he thought it was undignified—so the three of us attacked him with paintbrushes and ended up with a beautiful multicolored moustache print on the front flap.

I wonder if we still have that box. I haven’t seen it in a couple of moves. Then again, that’s the case for at least half of everything we own—unpacking and packing again hasn’t seemed worth the effort.

I pull out a double handful of circulars and oversize postcards addressed to “Our Neighbor” and “The Residents of . . .” and flick them into the bin, along with the dental appointment reminder postcard forwarded from Birmingham. There’s a greeting-card envelope in a cheerful shade of green, a very spring kind of color, with Mercedes’s handwriting on the front. It’s not all that surprising; technically I start virtual school today, taking online classes with a tutor in France so I get used to thinking and working in another language, and Mercedes always has a card waiting for my first day of school, no matter how many there are in a year.

What’s surprising are the other two envelopes, nearly identical in size. One is labeled all in caps, the writing effortlessly neat and legible, the kind that holds up well even as the paper and ink start to fade, the black print stark against the hot-pink card stock. The pale blue envelope has a mostly tidy scrawl, readable after a blink or two.

Mercedes’s card is right on schedule, but Vic and Eddison usually space theirs out a bit differently.

These are nothing like the card they’ll send in May, the one all three of them will sign. That one won’t have a note, not even a preprinted one. Just their signatures. Just a reminder that my sister’s murder hasn’t been forgotten. It takes some careful planning and an awareness of the postal service to make sure that one doesn’t arrive with my birthday cards.

Because nothing says happy birthday like the reminder that the FBI still doesn’t know who murdered your sister and a string of other girls over the years.

Inside the house, I strip off the outside layers to hang in the front closet, then head up the stairs to my room, peeling off the rest on the way. The cards get dropped onto my bed, the clothing onto the chair I dragged up from the neglected dining room to contain the chaos. After a hot shower that has my nose and fingertips painfully aware of returning sensation, I go back down to the kitchen and make packaged oatmeal, adding in cinnamon and honey and milk, and take it upstairs with me.

It’s only once I’m settled on the bed in pajamas, the oatmeal working its magic to warm my insides, that I reach for the envelopes.

Mercedes’s card is exactly what it should be, a cheerful back-to-school message in neon pen, half of it in Spanish because it cracks her up when I write back to her in French. I pull out Vic’s next, a black-and-white photo of three cats in massive sunglasses. The note inside is nonoccasional, a few lines about his oldest daughter’s college letters and the miserably rainy weather in northern Virginia. Eddison’s, with a picture carefully straddling the line between gross and funny, doesn’t have anything written in it at all.

Why all three?

But then I look at Mercedes’s card again, the front decked out in enough glitter to make a unicorn shit itself in glee, and realize some of the glitter doesn’t belong. The rest of it is superfine, pastel in tone. Here and there, though, are swirls of what look to be glitter glue, thick and a little gloppy and dried into little ridges of bright color. I slide a thumbnail under one of those swirls, gently prying it away. The paper tears on one curve, then releases. A moment later, I’ve got a rough circle of glue on one finger and an unobstructed view of part of the original card.

She covered over the butterflies.

Her name is Zoraida Bourret, and it’s Easter Sunday.

You like Easter in the more traditional churches, when the girls and women still wear white dresses and lace, and hats with ribbons or flowers. There’s something about sitting near the back of the church and seeing the sea of Easter hats.

And this year, you see Zoraida.

You’ve seen her before, of course, helping her mother with a horde of younger siblings. You’ve listened to the gossip, and that subtle something other that isn’t gossip but isn’t quite news. Her father was a police officer killed in the line of duty, and even though Zoraida was a sure shot for college and great things, she’s dropped all her extracurriculars and probably her chance for higher education in order to help at home, and no one even had to ask it of her.

What a good girl, the women say.

What a sweet child.

What a wonderful sister.

She doesn’t look anything like Darla Jean, but there’s something there that reminds you. It’s been almost a year since Darla Jean betrayed you, and even still you love her, miss her, mourn her.

But Zoraida really is a good girl. You’ve watched her enough to know that. She comes straight home from school, picking up her siblings on the way, and gets them all sorted with snacks and homework and activities, and almost always has dinner nearly done when their mother gets home from work. She helps with the baths and getting all the younger ones in bed, and only then does she sit down at the kitchen table and start on her own homework. It takes her late into the night, but then she’s up early again, making sure everyone gets breakfast and gets dressed and gets off to school.

And when the boys come round—and they do come round, because she’s a beautiful girl, and Lord, but the world lights up with her smile—she politely sends them away, because her family is more important.

Because she’s a good girl.

When the service lets out, it’s easy to steal the cute plastic purses a couple of her younger sisters have left on the pew. They forget them all the time, the twins, remembering them only halfway home, and because it’s a long walk to the church to save gas on the weekends, it’s always Zoraida who comes trudging back for them. She shakes her head at it every time, but she smiles, too, because she loves the twins and would do anything for them.

And you know you have to help her.

You have to make sure, for her sake, that she’s always this good, this pure.

So you steal the purses, knowing the twins will forget, and wait for her to come back. The church empties faster than usual, everyone heading home to egg hunts or dinner or extended family. You sit in the shadows and wait, and there she comes, fanning herself with her hat. It’s starched white lace, stiff and inflexible, with peach-colored ribbons woven through the brim and base of the crown. The peach and white look so soft against her dark skin. A single purple-throated lily is pinned like a corsage to her dress, almost high enough to be her shoulder.

You come up behind her, steps soft on the thin carpet, and cover her mouth with your hand. She draws a sharp breath, starts to scream, but your arm comes up against her throat. She struggles, but you know how long to keep the pressure firm, and she falls unconscious.

Her dress is so white, so clean. So innocent. You can’t bear the thought of ruining it.

So when one of her brothers comes by a bit later, worried when she didn’t return home right away, he finds her laid out before the altar, purple-throated white lilies in a halo about her head, her clothing neatly folded and stacked on a pew, the hat atop the pile and her plain buckle shoes beside. The gash across her throat is a clean line, because she couldn’t struggle while unconscious.

No pain, no fear.

She won’t have the chance to fall like Darla Jean, won’t face that temptation and betrayal.

Zoraida Bourret will always be a good girl.

Eddison’s apartment will never win prizes for decorating. It’s not homey, nor is it particularly cozy. If it has an aesthetic, it would probably be vaguely institutional. It’s tidy—even the dishes in the sink are rinsed and neatly stacked, waiting for him to empty and reload the dishwasher—but it doesn’t contain much that makes it feel personal. The walls are the same eggshell they were painted before he moved in. He did add curtains over the windows, partly because the blinds let in too much light and partly because he really doesn’t want anyone looking in. With the exception of the dinner table, a gaily colored tile-topped monstrosity Priya and her mother rescued from a closing Mexican restaurant and gave him as a joke, the furniture is dark and utilitarian. His movies and books live in the random extra closet near the television.

Generally Eddison prefers it that way. When he comes back from assignments where he’s been in people’s homes, seen all the personal ways people shape the places they live, he’s grateful to have a fairly neutral space where he can center himself again. And perhaps there’s a bit of paranoia to it. He’s not sure he knows anyone in law enforcement without the lingering, nearly-always-unspoken fear that one day someone might go after their loved ones in revenge. If he doesn’t have his loved ones out on display, if he doesn’t leave clues to his vulnerabilities lying around in open sight, even in his own apartment, it makes him feel safer.

He didn’t lose his sister because he joined the FBI—he joined the FBI because he lost his sister—but he can’t bear the thought of endangering his parents, or the various aunts and uncles and cousins he still keeps in contact with.

Today, though, when he’s spent the entire day staring at paperwork that will probably fill the rest of the week, he can’t help but realize that the place he calls home is downright sterile.

Changing out of his suit, he settles down on the couch with a box of takeout. Vic’s wife and mother, saints that they are, have offered many times to teach him how to cook properly, but the best he can manage without mayhem is ramen and blue-box mac and cheese. Contrary to Ramirez’s mockery, it has nothing to do with being male and everything to do with getting bored halfway through preparations.

He’s pretty sure the landlord would not be pleased to paint over smoke stains on his kitchen ceiling again.

His personal photos, anything with him or a loved one or a location connected to him, are packed away in shoe boxes hidden in a crawl space in the bedroom closet. There when he wants to look through them, hard for anyone else to find. A few photos are safe to put up, though, and he looks at them rather than try to find a game on the television.

He doesn’t remember telling Priya why there were no pictures displayed when she and her mother came to pick him up for a barbecue at Vic’s house those months they lived in D.C. He almost remembers mentioning it to her mother, though not any of the reasons. Then again, Deshani Sravasti is a formidable woman with a keen (and somewhat terrifying) ability to read people. She probably noticed the lack of photos even before he said anything about it, and made a fairly accurate guess as to why. So maybe she was the one to mention it to Priya.

Thus began the adventures of Special Agent Ken. He’s not sure where Priya got the Ken doll—he suspects one of Vic’s daughters—but she sewed it a suit and a little navy blue windbreaker with FBI in big yellow letters on the back. Now wherever she and her mother go, Special Agent Ken goes along with them, and gets his own photos with famous or interesting backdrops. The handful Eddison has framed are arrayed in an arc over the television.

His favorite is from Berlin; the doll is bent almost in half, facedown on a table next to a quarter-full glass of beer bigger than Ken would be standing. He can just see the tiny lederhosen peeking out from under the windbreaker. He’s pretty sure Priya is the only person he knows who would be completely comfortable making a doll look drunk for a photo session in a public space. She doesn’t sign or date the backs of the photos, just writes in a location for the more obscure backdrops. Personal in sentiment, impersonal in appearance.

Safe.

His phone rings, buzzing and dancing against the coffee table. He eyes it warily until he remembers that Priya was going to call. “So is your new town full of interesting things?” he asks instead of saying hello.

“Interesting is a good word for it,” she agrees. “The plazas are the weirdest mix of good intentions and resignation.”

“I finally got a chance to read the profile on your mother in December’s Economist,” he says. “It’s an impressive write-up.”

“The interview started out a bit rocky; he kept asking about Chavi and Dad, and Mum was less than pleased.”

Less than pleased for Deshani Sravasti normally means her victim is lucky to escape without pissing himself. Clearly the Economist sent someone made of sterner stuff, given how the rest of the interview turned out.

“It got better once he got less personal,” she continues. “Mum loves talking about putting out fires in the different branches.”

“I’m glad they’re recognizing her for it.” It had been startling to walk into the bookstore and see Deshani on the cover of the magazine, her gaze direct and challenging even in a photo. More pictures accompanied the article, one in her Birmingham office, the other with Priya on their couch.

He wasn’t surprised to see the tiny print that credited Priya as the photographer for the ones she wasn’t in.

There’s a pause then, less a second of silence than a hesitation, and the one thing Priya has never done is hesitate. This is the girl who, within ten minutes of meeting him, threw a teddy bear at his head and told him not to be such a fucking coward. They’ve been friends ever since.

He generally prefers not to examine what that might say about him.

“What is it, Priya?”

“Are you guys okay?”

The question makes him cold, for no reason he can name, and he jabs the plastic fork back into the noodles. “What, the team? We’re fine.”

“Are you? Because I got cards from all three of you today.”

Shit.

He had no way of knowing that Vic intended to send a card, but he should have remembered Ramirez. Would it have been less noticeable if only two of them had arrived?

But this is Priya, and she is her mother’s daughter, and neither of them has ever needed all the facts to get correctly from point A to point M.

“You don’t have to tell me what’s going on. I know you might not want to, or might not be able to. I’m just worried.” That hesitation again, that testing the ice before the step. “Mercedes glittered over the butterflies on her card.”

Fuck.

But last Tuesday—the day he’d sent the card—was a bad day for all of them. He shouldn’t be surprised.

“So let me rephrase slightly,” she continues. “Will you all be okay?”

Eddison sits on that a moment, lets it sink down to his bones as if there’s an answer to be found there. Priya doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t push or prod or rush him to a response. She’s gotten good at waiting.

The Butterflies were good at waiting, some better than others. Most of those who are left aren’t good at it anymore.

He wasn’t at the Garden when they pulled out the bodies of the girls who’d died in the moments leading up to the explosion, or in it. He was on his way back to Quantico, rage seeping into the places hollowed out by what he’d seen.

As they learned what had happened to those girls, he’d been filled with the horrifying realization that this case would never go away. Not that it wouldn’t be legally resolved; it would. Eventually. But this wasn’t a case to solve and put away, move on to the next. It wasn’t even one to idly look back on while reflecting on the course of one’s career.

This was a case to ruin you, to utterly wreck you for the rest of your life because how can people do this?

And because this is Priya who’s asking, Priya who knows better than most what it means to not be okay—knows that it’s all right to not be okay—he considers the limits of what he can and cannot tell her and decides it’s going to get out in the news anyway, but she won’t be the one to share it.

“One of the Garden survivors killed herself last week.”

She makes a small sound, thinking rather than responding.

“It wasn’t really a surprise,” he continues. “Not with this one. We were more surprised that she hadn’t done it earlier.”

“Family?”

“She broke while she was still inside there. Her family broke her the rest of the way. But she makes . . .”

She says it so he doesn’t have to. “Three,” she says simply. “That’s three suicides in less than four months.”

“There are two others the psychologists have issued warnings for. ‘More likely than not’ was how they put it.”

“And the others?”

“Time will tell.” He hates that phrase, hates its truthfulness more. “A few of them will be . . . not fine, I guess, but as fine as they can be. Anything tries to destroy them, they’ll burn the world to take it down with them.”

“Four months isn’t much time.”

“Less than four.”

“Less than four,” she agrees peaceably, not because the correction is important but because he’s still raw, and she knows it. He should be less okay with that than he is. He’s an FBI agent, damn it, and if he must be vulnerable he doesn’t need anyone to see it.

“Did you ever think about it?” he asks suddenly.

“No.” The answer is prompt, but not immediate. Not defensive, not reflexive. “Chavi was a very large part of my world, but she wasn’t all of it. However heartbroken I was, and am, I was equally pissed off. That makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?”

“Even if it doesn’t, other things do. My sister was taken from me. But I didn’t lose my freedom. I didn’t lose my identity. I didn’t have a set day to die.”

An expiration date, one of the Garden survivors calls it. Like a gallon of milk.

He can feel his shrimp lo mein churn in his stomach.

“I lost my sister. Your Butterflies lost themselves. There’s a difference in that, at least.”

“We knew she was going to do it. We warned her parents, begged them to let her get the help she was offered.”

“Vic begged.”

“And Ramirez,” he says without shame, because begging isn’t a thing he does.

He’s always been better with suspects than with victims. Another thing that probably says more about him than it should.

“Knowing doesn’t change how you feel once it happens.”

But doesn’t it? Then again, that’s not a question she’ll hold too close. The man who murdered her sister is still out there; even if they learn who he is, it won’t bring Chavi back.

“So do I ever get to meet them?” she asks.

He blinks, almost pulls the phone away from his ear to stare at it. “Who?”

“The ones who’ll set the world on fire if they have to burn. They sound like my kind of people.”

It startles a laugh out of him. “Oh, they are, they—no. No, absolutely not, you are never allowed to meet them,” he says sternly, brain catching up to the implications of that statement. Christ, Priya would get along with Inara and Bliss without question. Like a fucking house on fire. No.

Her soft huff of laughter, little more than a breath, eases some of that knot in his chest, and it’s bizarre how he can feel simultaneously better and worse.

But for his own well-being, as well as the state of the world at large, he very much needs them to never meet.

Oh-shit-thirty Wednesday morning, I snap from sleep to panicked flailing as the bed drops out from beneath me. Or seems to. I bounce against the mattress, slapping at my eyes to get rid of the crust. My room is still dark, but there’s enough light from the hallway to silhouette my mother, standing over my legs with her hands on her hips in a Superman pose. The bed frame creaks under her added weight.

I groan and flop back, yanking a pillow over my face. “What the hell, Mum?”

She laughs and drops down next to me. I can smell the coffee on her breath, warm and familiar on my neck, as she wraps an arm around me. “Just because you can stay in pajamas for class doesn’t mean you can avoid getting up at a reasonable hour.”

“Is it still dark outside?”

“Yes.”

“Then it is not a reasonable hour.”

Mum just laughs again and lifts the pillow to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Up, my love. I’ll make you breakfast.”

She does make amazing waffles. They might even be worth getting out of bed for.

Mum leaves for work right after breakfast, and I spend the rest of the morning trying to pummel my brain into thinking in French for math and science and history. So much history—it never occurred to me how US-centric even my world history classes were until I had to start playing catch-up to the kids I’ll be in a classroom with this fall.

When my head starts aching from the language overload, I put everything away and bundle up in eight or ten layers to brave the world outside. It’s a clear day, but cold. Oh my God, so cold.

Part of me wonders why the vets bother with the space heaters rather than going inside. It’s still cold enough to freeze a tit off just outside the pavilion and they’ve got three different Starbucks in spitting distance, after all. But I’m not going to ask. This will be my first time actually playing with them, and I have to earn my place. It’s the same with any group.

“Here, Blue Girl, you’re playing with me today,” announces the red-nosed Vietnam vet before I even get up onto the grass.

Some of the others snicker at the name, but it’s apt enough. The bindi between my eyes is blue crystal set in silver, same as the stud at my right nostril, and as soon as I pull the knitted cap off, the royal-blue streaks in my hair are bright and clear. The one who named me blinks at the hair, then laughs like he’s acknowledging a point.

“So what do I call you?” I ask, climbing over the bench.

“You call this ugly son of a bitch Corgi, you hear?” howls the man next to him, ignoring the elbow Corgi digs into his ribs. Their hats are identical, and I wonder how it must be to go through hell with someone and have each other to lean on after.

Well, a different kind of hell, anyway. Loss is loss, and my mother and I have each other, but we didn’t come through their kind of war.

Some of the others introduce themselves while Corgi and I place our pieces—Steven and Phillip and Jorge, and next to Corgi, Happy, who may be a little bit drunk. The others are intent on their games. From what I suspect is his customary corner, Gunny gives me a small smile and a wave, then looks back to his game with the bland-faced man I spoke to last time.

As Corgi and I start to play, Happy and Jorge pay more attention to our game than to theirs, both of them coaching me with often conflicting advice. Except for Happy’s initial outburst, they’re on their best behavior, which is to say, they alternate between extreme and sometimes awkward courtesy and the kind of crassness that probably made their sergeants cry with pride back in the day. They stumble over apologies as soon as they remember I’m listening. But I laugh with them, and gradually they relax into something that must be closer to their usual dynamic, or at least as close as it can be with a female intrusion.

“I thought you said you loved to play,” Corgi says suspiciously after his second easy victory.

“I didn’t say I was good at it.”

“Good thing,” notes Jorge.

Dad was so genuinely bad at the game that losing to him was more challenging than beating most casual players. Once I realized other people were more likely to let me stay and play if I wasn’t a threat to their pride? Well. Maybe part of me keeps the losing streak alive for Dad, but it’s also a strange form of pragmatism. Playing to lose lets me keep playing without any kind of pressure or drama.

We reset the pieces for the next game, and Happy comes around the tables to take my place, threatening to beat Corgi black and blue for some perceived insult. Corgi’s grinning.

Men say I love you in the strangest ways.

“Come play with me, Miss Priya,” Gunny invites, nudging his pieces back into starting position.

Everyone rearranges, finding new partners and squabbling over colors. I take the nothing man’s seat, but he just slides down one to face a (relatively) young Desert Storm vet who introduces himself as Yelp.

I managed not to ask with Corgi and Happy, but Yelp?

He grimaces, cheeks pink and stretched in a sheepish smile. “Got the name in Basic,” he mumbles. “Sarge would sneak up behind and bellow orders in my ear. Jumped a foot damn near always. Named me Yelp.”

And those kinds of names stick.

The nothing man looks at me with a small smile, but doesn’t offer his name. I don’t ask—there’s something about him, and I don’t want to risk him conflating courtesy with interest.

Gunny’s focus on the game isn’t great. He loses track of moves, forgets whose turn it is. Sometimes he gets caught up in a rambling story and doesn’t realize he hasn’t made his move yet. I don’t try to remind him, unless he looks confused. To be honest, I’d much rather be hearing about him and his buddies getting blitzed on fine wine in an abandoned chateau and trying to teach a cow to ski. It’s a little hard to picture this old man having that kind of energy, but he couldn’t have been much older than me when he got shipped out.

Every now and then Yelp looks at our board and shakes his head, giving me a wry look. I shrug, but don’t try to explain. My reasons are my own.

Gunny dozes off halfway through our second game. One of the Korea vets, who introduces himself as Pierce, drapes another blanket over the older man’s shoulders, tucking it up under his chin and over his hands. “Store offered to let us use their café,” he says gruffly, embarrassed, I think, by his own kindness. “Gunny said he’s old, not dead, and we’ll be out here or nowhere.”

“Nothing wrong with a little pride,” I reply. “At least not when you’ve got brothers to temper it with a bit of sense.”

He blinks at me, startled, and then smiles.

“I should probably head out anyway. There’s schoolwork I need to look over before tomorrow.” I ease off the bench, stretching stiff, aching muscles. “I’ll be back on Friday, if that’s okay.”

“Come on back whenever you want, Blue Girl,” Pierce says. I have a feeling Gunny will be the only one to call me Priya. “You’re welcome here.”

A little bubble of warmth blooms beneath my sternum. I’ve been allowed into a number of chess groups over the years, but this is the first time I’ve been truly welcomed since Boston.

I fix my coat, pull my hat back on, and head across the parking lot into the Kroger to get a hot drink. The space heaters keep the pavilion comfortable, if a bit on the chilly side, but the walk back home is long enough I’d rather have cocoa to keep me company.

It’s a pretty long line in the café, which seems to be the result of a new barista, working solo, trying to fill the constantly changing orders of a horde of older women in purple and red.

Is there a collective noun for the Red Hat Society ladies?

Next to the line, just a few feet away from me, someone settles into a chair, draping his heavy brown coat over the back of another chair. It’s the nothing man from chess. He pulls a book from the pocket of the coat, a large paperback so battered and busted it’s impossible to know what it is. The pages curl at the sides, the spine is cracked in too many places, and the front and back covers are gone. Just gone. He opens the book, but he’s not looking at it.

He’s looking at me. “A drink does sound just the thing.”

Then why isn’t he in line?

I shift my weight, sidling a few inches away. He’s not even that close, really, it just feels invasive. And I probably shouldn’t keep calling him the nothing man; that’s the kind of thing that spills out by accident and causes problems. “I don’t think I ever got your name.”

“I don’t think I ever gave it.”

I shuffle forward as the line moves. One of the red-and-purple ladies is scolding, and the barista looks about to break down.

“It’s cold outside,” the man says after a little too long being silent.

“It’s February in Colorado.”

“It makes for a cold walk,” he continues, either missing or ignoring the sarcasm. “Would you like a ride?”

“No, thank you.”

“You like the cold?”

“I need the exercise.”

I don’t turn, but I can feel his eyes move down, then back up. “You don’t, not really. You’re fine as you are.”

What the hell is wrong with people?

I move forward again, a little too far away for him to politely speak, and after another couple of minutes, up to the register. “Venti hot chocolate, please.”

“And your name?”

“Jane.” I pay, get my change, and slide along the counter to the pickup spot. The Red Hat ladies are flocked around the condiments bar, gradually migrating to a corner where they push all the tables together.

“Jean!” calls the barista. Close enough.

I wade through the last of the purple-and-red horde, doctor my drink, and start toward the door.

“It gets dark early; are you sure you don’t want that ride?” offers the nothing man as I pass him.

“I’m sure, thank you.”

“My name is Landon.”

No, his name is Creep.

But I nod to acknowledge and walk off.

Creepy men are an unfortunate fact of life. I watched Chavi get harassed from a young age, and I had to put up with it myself even before I got walloped with the puberty stick. I’ve never seen anyone brave enough to be inappropriate to Mum, but I’m sure it happens. It probably just comes out in more subtle fashion.

There’s only one surprise when I check the mail: a plain white envelope with a return address I don’t recognize, but my info is written out in Vic’s blocky print and the frank is from Quantico. Inside the house, I peel off layers and hang them in the front closet, then turn to the spindly, tile-topped table at the base of the stairs. A butterfly with open wings spans the four tiles, all soft, dreamy greens and purples, but it’s almost completely covered with a circle of yellow silk chrysanthemums, a fat red candle, and a picture frame.

That’s where Chavi lives now, in that frame and others like it. The frame is coated in gold glitter, worn away to the gold paint beneath in the upper left corner. The three of us spent a long time deciding which picture to put in there. We knew which one we wanted, which was the most quintessentially Chavi, but it was also the one the police and media used, the one that was plastered all over the Web and the papers and the posters asking if anyone had information. Eventually, we went with it anyway. It was Chavi.

It was her senior photo, and even against the standard mottled-grey background and the self-consciously awkward chin-on-fist pose, the things that make her her blaze out. There’s a light in her eyes, framed with heavy black wings and shimmering white-and-gold shadows, with a bright slash of red at her mouth to match the streaks in her hair. Her bindi and nose stud were red and clear crystal, set in gold, bold and warm like the rest of her. Her skin was darker than mine, dark like Dad’s, which just made the color stand out that much more. What made the photo most Chavi, though, was that she’d completely forgotten that was the day of her appointment. She’d spent the morning playing with a new box of oil pastels, then had to rush to get ready, and she managed to look flawless—save for the rainbow smear of pastels on the outside of the fist propping up her chin.

Digging out the box of matches from the tiny drawer under the tabletop, I light the red candle and lean over to kiss that worn corner. This is how we keep Chavi with us, part of our lives in a way that doesn’t feel too clingy or creepy or crazy.

We don’t have a picture up of Dad, but then, Chavi didn’t choose to leave. Dad did.

Settling onto the couch, I turn the envelope over in my hands, looking for clues about the contents. I don’t really like mystery mail; I got too much of it after Chavi died, people all over the country finding our address and sending us letters or cards or flowers. Hate mail, too; it’s astonishing how many people feel the need to write complete strangers to tell them why their loved one “deserved” to die. Vic’s handwriting is reassuring, but also strange. For anything more than a card, he usually warns me to keep an eye out for it.

And it is definitely not Vic’s writing inside. The script matches the return address, the letters elegant but simple, easy to read. There isn’t a greeting, just a launch straight into:

Victor Hanoverian tells me you know what it’s like to put yourself back together after terrible things.

I do too, or I used to. Maybe I still do, for myself, but there are others now, and I’m not sure what to tell them, or how to help them. Not the way I used to know or be able to guess.

My name is Inara Morrissey, and I’m one of Vic’s Butterflies.

Oh holy shit.

I glance over the rest of the letter, not even skimming so much as checking the handwriting to see if there’s a note from Vic, something to indicate why he decided to mail this. Doesn’t that break a rule or something? I know her name, of course—the Butterflies have been national news for almost four months now—but our cases are only connected through the agents. Isn’t there some Bureau regulation about keeping things separate?

But then, Vic was careful, wasn’t he? He didn’t give my address to Inara; he mailed it himself. I don’t have to reply, I don’t have to give her my information. How does she even know about me, though?

I go back to where I left off.

I saw your picture on Eddison’s desk a few weeks ago, and Eddison being the prickly bastard that he is, I was curious. I didn’t think he even liked people. Vic was the one to tell me who you were, or rather, what you were, at least when they met you. He said you lost your sister to a serial killer, and my first thought was “Huh, me too.”

I think that’s the first time I ever called any of the girls my sister, and I was surprised by how much it hurt. To lose them again in a new way, maybe, or that I felt that way about them and I never said.

I’m not asking what happened to you. I know I could look it up, but I don’t want to. To be honest, I’m far less interested in what happened to you than I am in what you chose to do after.

It was easy to be strong in the Garden. The others looked to me and I could let them because I knew how to tread water and I could hold them while they learned. We’re out now, though, and they’re looking to me to be as strong as I was in the Garden, and I don’t know how to do that with everyone watching.

I don’t know how to do any of this. I was always broken, and I was always okay with that. I was what I was. Now people are clamoring to see how I’ll fix myself, and I don’t want to fix myself. I shouldn’t have to. If I want to stay broken, isn’t that my choice?

When Vic mentions you, or just hears your name, he looks like it’s one of his own girls being talked about. Eddison actually seems to like you, and I was fairly convinced he hated anything with a pulse. And Mercedes smiles, and looks a little sad, and I’m coming to understand that she’ll smile at anyone, but she’s only sad for the people she loves.

They adopted you, in their way, and now they’ve adopted me and I’m not entirely sure how to let them.

You don’t have to write back. I find I can’t talk to the other girls about any of this because they need me to seem stronger, and I don’t want to let them down. But Vic smiled when I asked if it would be okay to write, so I’m hoping it’s a better idea than it feels.

How do you put yourself back together when the pieces permanently lost are the only reasons anyone’s looking at you?

Um.

She’s asking me how to do something I’m not sure I’ve actually done. If I had to guess, that’s exactly why Vic sent the letter: because she’s right. We shouldn’t have to fix ourselves if we don’t want to. We shouldn’t have to be strong or brave or hopeful or any such bullshit. Mum has always emphatically stated that it’s okay to not be okay. We don’t owe that to anyone else.

I need to sit on this for a few days.

When Mum comes home a few hours later, laptop bag and briefcase in one hand, bags of takeout in the other, I have my journal out, searching for a way to explain how much it meant when Pierce said I was welcome at the chess pavilion. “Get the plates?” she asks, leaning down to kiss the frame and almost lighting her scarf on fire. She drops the bags beside her, the takeout with more care than her computer.

She looks beautiful and fierce in her work clothes, the grey pencil skirt and blazer severely tailored and not much softened by the lavender silk blouse and patterned scarf. Her long hair is pulled back into a tight twist and pinned to within an inch of its life, and her heels are just high enough to be authoritative, just low enough to still kick your ass. The only things that seem out of place are the things that carry over with her to after-work, the emerald-and-gold bindi and nose stud, and the slim gold hoop curving over the middle of her lower lip.

Mum very purposefully left her family and most of her culture behind in London when we came to America twelve years ago, but she kept the bits she liked. Mostly she kept the things that kept people from assuming we were Muslim. Mum didn’t much care if she was being somewhat sacrilegious as long as it kept her brown daughters safe. The bindi, the jewelry, the mehndi when we do it, they’re all supposed to have more weight than we give them.

I get up and get the plates and silverware. After bringing the takeout bag into the living room, I head back and grab a couple glasses of milk and some clean Tupperware. I wait, though, to let Mum dish out. It’s that self-control thing. I just feel better letting her control the portions.

She comes back downstairs in yoga pants and a loose, long-sleeved T-shirt that used to have the logo of Chavi’s high school printed across the front. You can still see bits of it, if you squint and already know what it’s supposed to say. The rest is faded and peeled and comfortably worn. Her hair is out of its pins, twisted into a haphazard braid down her back. This is the Mum who likes to bury her fingers in soil and help things grow, who’s always been as quick as her daughters to launch a pillow fight.

Plopping down onto the carpet so we can treat the coffee table like an actual table, she reaches out for the boxes and starts dishing out. Orange shrimp and lo mein noodles for her, sweet-and-sour chicken and white rice for me, each meal split about evenly between the plates and the Tupperware containers. She parcels out the sack of egg rolls but doesn’t try to separate the bowls of soup—wonton for me and egg drop for her. Takeout soup just doesn’t reheat well enough to bother. Tomorrow, we’ll both have the leftovers for lunch and some other kind of takeout for dinner.

Most of the kitchen is still in boxes, something that is unlikely to change in the coming weeks. Cooking is just not a thing that’s going to happen.

“How was chess?” she asks around a shrimp.

“It was good. I’m looking forward to going back.”

“Get a good feeling from everyone?”

“Almost everyone.” Her gaze sharpens on me, but I shrug and bite into a piece of sauce-covered chicken. “I’ll avoid the exception.”

“You’ll take your pepper spray just in case?”

“It’s on my keys. Outer pocket of the coat.”

“Good.”

We eat in silence for a while, but it’s not awkward or uncomfortable, just a way to let the day process and filter out so we can enjoy the evening. Eventually she turns on the TV to a news channel and mutes it, skimming the headlines on the ticker and under the inset photos. When we’re done eating, we both stand to clear the table. She grabs the leftovers and trash, and I take the plates and silverware. We have a dishwasher, currently blocked off by two stacks of boxes, but there’s not really a reason to use it, not for only two of us. I rinse and wash everything and pop it on the drying rack next to the sink.

Mum settles back onto the carpet after, turning on the Xbox and a Lego game. I curl into the couch with my current journal.

For a long time, the only words on the page are Dear Chavi.

Chavi started the journals even before I was born. She took plain composition books and decorated the covers, and started writing me letters so she could prepare her baby sister for life. When I got old enough to learn how to write and start keeping my own journals, it just made sense to write back to her. We didn’t exactly read each other’s books. Sometimes we’d copy out sections or entries for the other, or read a bit aloud. We used to sit next to each other on one bed or another and write after Dad shooed us to bed—because if Dad was tired, we must all be tired—and I can’t even think how many times I fell asleep with my face on the page and a pen in hand, and woke up to my sister tucking me in next to her.

“Are we leaving Chavi behind?” I ask suddenly.

Mum pauses the game and looks over her shoulder at me. After a moment, she sets the controller on the table and leans against the couch.

“Going to France,” I clarify. “Are we leaving her behind?”

“Did we leave her behind when we left Boston?”

Her ashes are in a subdued urn that looks a bit more like a wine tube than anything else. Dad insisted we keep it on the mantel, but Mum and I keep it packed away, waiting for France and the chance to spread the ashes in lavender fields. Not that Chavi ever asked for that, because how many seventeen-year-olds have to think of funerary wishes, but it feels appropriate. She loved excursions to the Loire Valley when we used to visit, back when we lived in London.

But Chavi isn’t really her ashes. She’s more her photo in our chrysanthemum-and-candle shrine than she is her ashes, but it’s still not . . .

“Is France going to be home?”

“Ah. Now it takes shape.” Twisting around to face me, Mum wraps her arm around my ankles so she can comfortably rest her chin on my fuzzy socks. “We’ve had houses since Chavi died, but we haven’t really had home, have we?”

“You’re home.”

“And always will be,” she says easily. “But that’s a person. You’re talking about a place.”

“Is it selfish?”

“Oh, sweetheart, no.” Her thumb rubs the hollow behind my anklebone. “Losing Chavi was terrible. That wound will be with us, always. I know we’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern, with all the moves, but when we settle in France, can you even imagine how pissed she’ll be if we don’t make our home there? If we always make ourselves feel transient?” Her chin digs into the top of my foot. “Five years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a life without Chavi in it.”

“But that’s our life now.”

“But that’s our life now,” she agrees. “And once we’re in a place for longer than five months, once a place is ours, we owe it to ourselves and to your sister to really make it ours. To make it home. It’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it?”

I nod, the world blurry.

“We love her; that means that it isn’t possible for us to leave her behind.”

I nod again.

“There’s something else.” When I don’t answer immediately, Mum walks two fingers up my leg until she can poke the ticklish spot near my knee. “Priya.”

“Another girl is going to die this spring,” I whisper, because it seems a terrible thing to say out loud. “He’ll kill again, because as long as they don’t catch him, there’s no reason for him not to keep going. So how do you make a man stop killing?”

“Personally? String him up by his balls and skin him with a dull, rusty knife. I hear the police frown on that, though.”

And maybe that’s the thing still niggling at me about Inara’s letter. Everything about the Garden is caught up in a media shit storm, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Everyone has an opinion, everyone has a theory. Everyone has their own notion of what justice means. I used to think I wanted nothing more than to see Chavi’s murderer get arrested, but the older I get, the more I see the appeal of Mum’s more straightforward approach.

So what does that make me?

The morning of the funeral, Eddison picks Ramirez up from her tiny house (which she insists is properly called a cottage) and drives over to Vic’s place. It’s obscenely early, the sky not even grey yet, but it’s a long drive to the Kobiyashis’ home in North Carolina. He parks on the curb so he doesn’t block in Vic or either of the Mrs. Hanoverians.

The front door opens before they even get to the porch. Mrs. Hanoverian the elder, Vic’s mother, steps back to let them inside. “Look at you two,” she sighs. “Crows, the both of you.”

“It’s a funeral, Marlene,” Ramirez reminds her, dropping a kiss on her cheek.

“When I eventually kick it, none of you are allowed to wear black. I’m writing it into my will.” She closes the door and tugs Eddison down by his coat so she can kiss his cheek. It’s only been an hour since he shaved, so for once he isn’t stubbled and scruffy. “Good morning, dear. Come into the kitchen and have some breakfast.”

It’s on the tip of his tongue to say no—he doesn’t like eating this early; it just sits in his stomach and makes him feel ill—but Marlene Hanoverian had her own bakery until she decided to retire, and he’d have to be much more stupid than he is to turn away anything she’s made.

They walk into the kitchen and he stops short, staring at the already occupied table. Two young women, both eighteen, look back at him. One of them twitches her lips in acknowledgment. The other grins and flips him the bird. Both have cinnamon rolls dripping with icing on small plates before them.

He’s not sure why he’s shocked. Of course some of the other survivors might want to be present for the funeral. While it would be too traumatic for some, he can well imagine some might come purely to see their fellow former captive safely lowered into the ground, rather than preserved in glass and resin in the Garden’s hallways like most of the others had been.

“Morning,” he says warily.

“Vic offered us a ride,” says the taller one. Inara Morrissey—he seems to recall hearing that the name change is official now—wears a deep red dress that should probably clash with her golden-brown coloring but doesn’t. She looks elegant, and entirely too put together for this early in the morning. “We took the train down yesterday.”

They live in New York now. Well, Inara did before she was kidnapped. Bliss lived in Atlanta, and moved in with Inara and the various other roommates as soon as she was out of custody. The rest of her family migrated to Paris for her father’s job, and if Eddison occasionally wonders whether or not that particular set of relationships is mending, he’s not going to poke the bear by asking.

He knows he shouldn’t call her Bliss—that was the name the Gardener gave her, and it’s both painful and wildly inaccurate—but he can’t call her Chelsea. Chelsea is such a normal name, and Bliss is such a hellion. Until she tells him otherwise, she’s Bliss. She’s tiny, barely coming to Inara’s shoulder even when they’re seated. Her wild black curls are caught back in combs and she’s wearing a bold blue dress a few shades richer than her almost violet eyes.

He’s not surprised that neither of them is wearing black. He knows they don’t avoid it in general. Both are fairly well-adjusted (though he sometimes has his doubts about Bliss) and both work at a restaurant that requires them to wear it. Their only clothing in the Garden, however, was black. Black, and open-backed to show their wings. To honor one of their own, they would never choose it. He just hopes the Kobiyashis won’t think it’s rude.

But then, Bliss is rude. It’s not the first time she’s said hello by flipping him off.

“Is anyone else coming?” he asks, exercising healthy caution by letting Ramirez slide in first on the curved bench seat. He can respect the hell out of both girls for coming through what they did more or less intact, but he’s never quite sure if he likes them. That ambiguity is entirely mutual. Any time he can keep at least one person between him and them, he does so, and doesn’t feel like a coward for it.

“Danelle and Marenka might,” Inara answers, licking icing off one finger. Small remnants of discoloration on the backs of her hands mark the worst of the burns and gashes from the night the Garden exploded. “They hadn’t decided yet when we spoke to them on Wednesday.”

“They’re worried the Kobiyashis will be assholes to them,” adds Bliss. When Ramirez glances at her, questioning, Bliss draws the shape of a butterfly over her face.

Both agents shudder.

Because somehow, the case kept getting worse. Some girls, either because they were already broken or because they thought it might help them escape, had cozened up to their captor, and he’d mark them with his favor by tattooing another set of wings on their faces, to match the ones on their backs. Everyone else could cover up their wings, once they were out of the Garden. Danelle and Marenka, the only survivors to have gotten that second set of wings, have to rely on a hell of a lot of good makeup.

Even with the smaller sets on their faces covered, those who know they’re there treat the girls differently. Treat them worse, as if sucking up to try to stay alive longer makes them evil.

He hopes they decide against coming. He actually likes Danelle and Marenka, both of them calm and steady and less sharp-edged than Inara and Bliss. Better for them to grieve Tereza—Amiko, he reminds himself, her name is Amiko—without her parents being hateful.

Marlene sets plates before him and Ramirez, then pours out mugs of coffee. Despite the hour and the fact that she’s not going to the funeral, she’s fully dressed, a single strand of pearls soft and prim against her dark green sweater set. “That poor girl,” she says. “At least she’s at peace now.”

That rather depends on what you believe, doesn’t it? Ramirez touches the crucifix at her throat and doesn’t say anything. Inara and Bliss both take over-large bites of pastry, chewing to keep from speaking.

Eddison’s not really sure what he believes when it comes to death or suicide or any of that.

Vic comes into the kitchen then, adjusting the knot on his dark brown tie. Eddison and Ramirez are both dressed for a funeral; Vic is dressed for a Butterfly’s funeral, in brown and ivory somber enough to be respectful to grieving parents and far enough from black to be comforting to survivors. It’s exquisitely sensitive and intuitive and a number of other adjectives Eddison is decidedly not, even on his best days.

“Sit down and eat, Victor,” his mother tells him.

He kisses the top of her head, safely away from the tidy coils of silver hair that have been pinned in place. “We have to head out, Ma, it’s almost—”

“Victor, you will sit and eat and start this terrible day off right.”

He sits.

Inara covers her mouth with one hand, but her pale brown eyes are bright. She’s a very contained young woman, restrained in expression around most. The survivors are somewhat exceptions, but he has a feeling she’s only truly relaxed around the girls she lives with. “Mrs. Hanoverian, please tell me you used to write notes in his school lunches.”

“Let’s see, Mondays I told him to make good choices; Tuesdays I told him to make me proud; Wednesdays I told him . . .” But she trails off, smiling as the girls dissolve into almost silent laughter, leaning against each other.

“And you doubted me,” Vic chides around a mouthful of cinnamon roll.

It’s strange to be laughing before they head out to a seventeen-year-old’s funeral. Sixteen. Her birthday would have been in a few weeks.

Inara catches his eye and shrugs. “You laugh or you cry. Which would you rather do?”

“Yell,” he says succinctly.

“Me too,” Bliss replies, teeth bared in a snarl. A bit of cinnamon-heavy bread is caught between two of her teeth.

He figures Inara will eventually tell her about it.

The seven-hour drive to North Carolina is quiet, but not silent. Ramirez stretches out in the very back seat, because if she’s a passenger without paperwork to keep her busy, she will fall asleep before the next exit, every time. Inara and Bliss sit in the middle, the radio turned down to allow conversation with Vic in the driver’s seat. Eddison listens but doesn’t particularly contribute. Most of his attention is on his phone, skimming through Google alerts for bodies found in churches. It’s a little early in the year yet for Chavi’s murderer to strike again, but he checks regularly, just in case.

Bliss is taking classes, filling in gaps in her education so she can take her GED this summer. Neither she nor Inara has decided yet about college, it seems. He gets it. If they know what they want to do—and he doesn’t think they do—why throw themselves into it now when they know the eventual trial is going to take up so much time? They’re already down in D.C. fairly frequently to answer more questions in pretrial. They’ll both be called to testify if the case gets to the courtroom before they’re eighty, and Inara has already promised the other girls she’ll be there when they take their turns on the stand.

No matter how often he hears proof of Inara as housemother, he still can’t wrap his brain around it. It’s like a pit bull in a tutu.

A Butterfly with boxing gloves.

After two stops for gas and a meal, they pull up to the church for the funeral. There aren’t many cars in the parking lot.

“Are we early?” Ramirez asks groggily, reaching for her purse so she can fix her makeup.

“A little,” Vic answers.

Ramirez isn’t awake enough, but Eddison hears the layer tucked into the simple words: Vic doesn’t expect there to be many people.

Bliss releases her seat belt with a click and a heavy thunk of the latch hitting the door. “Told you. The Kobiyashis are assholes. They probably wouldn’t hold a funeral at all if the suicide hadn’t hit the news.”

Eddison glances back at Inara, who knew Tereza better than Bliss did, but she’s looking out the window at the white-boarded church.

They all get out of the car and stretch, and Vic takes Bliss’s hand and hooks it around his elbow as they walk ahead to the double doors. Part of it is manners—Marlene raised a gentleman—but Eddison’s willing to bet a month’s pay that Vic’s hoping to keep a leash on Bliss’s idea of small talk. Ramirez double-checks her face in the tinted window and hurries after.

Eddison’s in no hurry. He leans against the side of the car, looking up at the Baptist church. Except for the space in front of the doors, the building is lined with thick, dark shrubs in beds of reddish mulch. There’s extra space in front of the shrubs, a stretch of pine chips before the faded grass picks up. Flower beds? The church probably looks rather charming that way, all abloom, but that makes him think of the Garden, of how he’s told it looked before the explosions, and fuck, is there anything this case doesn’t touch?

He’s gone to more funerals than he can count, and yet every single one is just . . .

Inara settles next to him against the car, hands clasped at her waist. A black-and-gold wristlet dangles from her hooked pinky. “You don’t have to be here, you know.”

“Yes, I—” But he stops, swallows back the reflexive indignation, because this is Inara. Inara, who always means what she says, but usually not in the way you first expect.

And he realizes that no, he doesn’t have to be here. There’s no Bureau requirement, no order, no generally agreed guideline, nothing official that mandates his presence at the funeral of a girl who killed herself because the seams where she broke the first time were too fragile to stitch together a second time. It’s his personal code that has him here, his principle that keeps him facing terrible things because it’s the right thing to do.

It’s his choice.

He looks over at her, unsurprised to find her watching him, her thoughts on the matter neatly tucked away and impossible to read. That’s not something she learned in the Garden, or after. That’s always been her life. “Thank you.”

“Careful, Eddison,” she teases, her hands lifting in mock surrender. “Someone might hear and think you almost like me.”

“Almost,” he agrees, just to see her startled smile.

He doesn’t offer her his arm, and she doesn’t expect it. They push off from the car and walk together into the church, shoulders tight with the shared awareness that this almost certainly won’t be the last Butterfly funeral, but it might be the worst.

For Inara, it might be the worst funeral, full stop, but Eddison is far too aware that spring is coming. Whoever killed Chavi Sravasti and so many other girls will kill again, responding to triggers the FBI can’t name, and Eddison will stand next to Vic and Ramirez at yet another funeral and feel like a terrible person, because he’ll be grateful it isn’t Priya.

I’ve had five years for the reality of Chavi’s death to seep into my bones, but that doesn’t keep the memories from bleeding sometimes, doesn’t prevent the nightmares that wake me in a sweat, throat raw from screaming. I don’t know that anything will ever actually stop them.

Mum wakes me with a firm shake, her arms around me before I can open my eyes, before I can properly recall that I’m safe, in my bed in our rental house in Huntington, far away from the neighborhood church outside of Boston where I last saw my sister. The nightmares don’t fall into any sort of pattern—there’s no way to guess what will trigger one—but they happen often enough that we’ve developed a routine for dealing with them.

While I take a cool shower, Mum strips my bed of sweat-damp sheets and heads downstairs to the laundry room. When she comes back, two mugs of tea in her hands, I’m already in fresh pajamas and settled in her bed. Neither of us wants me alone after one of these dreams, but I won’t sleep again and I don’t want her to lose sleep staying up with me, so this is our compromise. We pop in a DVD and Mum is out cold halfway through the first episode of one of the BBC Nature programs.

I brought my journal to Mum’s room, but I’m not really feeling it. There are years of nightmares across dozens of journals; telling Chavi about another one won’t help anything.

Maybe telling someone else might.

Inara’s letter sticks out from the top of the notebook, where it’s been living for the past week. Maybe I finally know how to answer it.

Dear Inara,

My sister Chavi died on a Monday, two days after my twelfth birthday. She was seventeen.

We spent all weekend celebrating my birthday. Saturday we spent at the nearby park. Technically it was a churchyard, but the church was tangled in taxes and repossession, and our neighborhood just sort of . . . took it over. Everything was blooming, and the day was filled with laughter and games and food. Not everyone in the neighborhood got along, but most did. Sunday was for family, for favorite meals and movies. Our only trip out was when Mum and Chavi took me to the mall to get my nose pierced.

Dad stayed behind in protest. My parents were both born in India and raised in London, and he always argued that leaving behind a community of culture meant giving up the signs of it, too.

Monday, though, we were back to school. Usually, Chavi would bike from the senior high to the junior, and we’d head home together, but I had a yearbook meeting and she had a study group. Chavi had more freedom than a lot of her friends and classmates, mostly because she didn’t abuse it. She let Mum know when she arrived or left places, always updated her if plans, locations, or people changed. Always.

When Chavi texted to say she’d be home by nine, we had every reason to expect she would be, but nine o’clock came and went, and Chavi didn’t.

Ten o’clock came and went, and Chavi didn’t.

She didn’t answer texts or calls, and that just wasn’t Chavi.

Mum called the others in the study group, but they all said the same thing: she left the coffee shop around eight, biking the same direction as always. One of the boys offered her a ride, but she said no. Chavi always said no when he offered her something, because he had a crush on her and she didn’t feel the same way. Dad laughed at Mum and me for worrying. Chavi was just being a teenager, he said, and when she got home, she’d be grounded and she wouldn’t ever do it again. That wasn’t Chavi, though.

The disc menu pops up on the television, tinkling music on a twenty-second loop. Rather than get up to change the disc, I hit “play all” again. I take a moment to shake out my hand, rubbing out the cramps starting to form.

Chavi going missing is easy to talk about. What followed is less so.

But Inara’s nightmares are out there for the world to see; until the next girl dies, mine are on the page only for her. I can do this.

Mum called the police. The dispatcher listened and agreed it was out-of-character behavior, and started asking questions. Where was she last seen? What was she wearing? What color was her bike? Could we email a recent photo? We lived outside of Boston back then. Chavi was off to college in the fall, but she was still seventeen, so she was still a child. The dispatcher said one officer would come to the house, in case Chavi came back, but others would be out looking.

By then, Dad was pissed. At Chavi, for making people worry. At Mum, for causing such a fuss. At me, even, for insisting on going out with Mum to search. I missed most of their argument, because Mum sent me upstairs to dress in something warmer, but when I came down, the newly arrived officer was standing in the doorway looking profoundly uncomfortable while Mum told Dad to stay and wait if he couldn’t be bothered to break a sweat for his missing child.

You don’t fuck with Mum.

It was late enough that none of the patrol cars had their sirens on. Their lights flashed, though, and it brought neighbors out of their houses and more people joined the search. It’s something to see, really, everyone throwing coats over nightclothes and pairing off with flashlights and whistles.

Josephine—Chavi’s best friend and girlfriend, though most only knew the first bit—went toward the school to look. Her mother had to hold the flashlight because Josephine was shaking too much. She knew the same thing Mum and I did: Chavi would never just go off or stay out.

Mum and I went to the church. It hadn’t actually been a church since just after we moved there, but everyone still called it that. A few members of the former congregation even donated a salary for Frank, the Desert Storm vet who lived in a studio at the back of the lot and kept everything up. One of the side doors was always unlocked in case of bad weather or a need for shelter. Maybe Chavi had fallen from her bike and couldn’t get all the way home. Maybe her hypothetical fall had broken her phone, so she couldn’t call for help.

We looked through the park first, but when she turned toward the trees at the back of the property, Mum told me to wait by the church. Whenever the weather got warm, transients started camping there overnight, so she didn’t want me back there even with her. She told me again to wait, promised she’d wake up Frank so she wasn’t alone.

I didn’t follow her, but I also didn’t wait. Couldn’t wait, not if there was a chance my sister was inside that building. It didn’t occur to me for a second that it could be dangerous. The church was safe, not because of any religious sensibility but because it was always safe. Chavi and I were always safe there.

We could spend hours at a time there on sunny days. She’d sit on the floor, sketch pad on one knee, puddles of colored light on the grey stone around her. We were so in love with the stained-glass windows. She kept saying she couldn’t get the drawings right, and she’d try again and again and again, and I’d stand off to one side with my camera to capture the dust that danced in the sunbeams, the color on the stone, the way the light and motes made Chavi glitter.

On the good days, that’s the Chavi I see when I close my eyes: light and color and glitter.

I push “play” again on the disc menu and press my hand flat against the blanket, willing it to stop shaking.

I can do this.

I don’t even have to send it, if it’s too overwhelming. But I can finish this. How many times has Inara had to tell her story to strangers?

She was out in the open in the T of space between the altar and the discolored portions of floor where the pews used to be. She was stark naked, but my mind latched less on to the fact that she was nude—she was my sister, I’d seen her naked before—than on the fact that her clothes were neatly folded and stacked on top of her backpack a few feet away. Chavi might as well have been allergic to folding her clothes for as often as she did it. But seeing how utterly clean her favorite shirt was made me realize how much blood was on the floor around her, and I dropped to my knees beside her, pushing at her to wake up, please, wake up. I was still screaming.

I’d never seen so much blood before.

I didn’t hear Frank come in but suddenly he was there, half-dressed and carrying a paint gun. He took one look at Chavi, turned grey, and whirled around in a wild circle. Looking for whoever did it, I realized much later. Then his arm came around me and he tried to tug me away.

I think I remember him speaking? I’ve never been sure.

But I wasn’t going to leave. I fought his grip, and truthfully he was too shocked to put much strength behind it. I was still screaming at Chavi, poking at the ticklish spot on her ribs because she could never sleep through that, and she still didn’t move.

There was a sound at the door, followed by Mum’s yell, my name sharp and shrill and scared, and Frank ran to her. He kept her from coming in, physically barring the way, and he begged her, weeping, to call me to her. Just call me away from Chavi.

I’ll never forget the flowers around Chavi, and in her hair: yellow chrysanthemums like suns.

You know how big news tragedies or events have that one pivotal, iconic photograph? So that years or even decades later, people can instantly recognize the picture?

When a reporter broke the story, they didn’t have a picture of Chavi’s body, just a yearbook shot and whatever they could find on Facebook. So they used a photo of me.

Twelve years old and covered in blood, still screaming and sobbing, and reaching for the church—for my sister—as a grim-faced paramedic carried me away. For months, that picture was everywhere. I couldn’t escape it, and it crops up again every spring when another girl dies with the flowers and a slit throat and someone calls the FBI with the theory that it’s the same guy.

I wasn’t there when they told Dad. It must have been the officer waiting at the house. Dad came to the hospital, where a doctor gave me a mild sedative against the shock, and he moved so slowly, like his whole body ached. Like he’d aged centuries. He’d laughed at our worries.

I don’t think I ever heard him laugh again.

Chavi died, declared the official report, between nine and ten Monday night.

The rest of our family died around midnight, only it took a while to know for sure. Mum and I were phoenixes, rising in our own way. Dad just burned and burned until he didn’t.

The public steals tragedies from victims. It sounds strange, I know, but I think you may be one of the few people who’ll understand what I mean by that. These things happened to us, to our loved ones, but it hits the news and suddenly everyone with a TV or computer feels like they’re entitled to our reactions and recoveries.

They’re not. It takes a while to really believe it, but you owe them nothing.

Our agents are good at adopting strays, but we don’t actually have to let them. They make the overtures, sure, but we’re the ones who allow it to become a real thing. There’s comfort in that, in knowing we can at any moment choose to walk away and they will absolutely let us.

There’s more comfort in realizing we want to stay, that this is a good thing we’re allowed to have.

That we’re allowed to be happy.

I’m still working on that, but in the meantime? We’re allowed to be broken. We don’t have to feel ashamed of that.

Write back, if you’d like. I don’t know that I have any wisdom to impart, but your letters are welcome.

She’s only a year and a half older than me.

I guess it isn’t the years that matter.

Hours later, when Mum leaves for work, I retreat back to my room and wrap myself in my comforter like a burrito. I don’t sleep exactly, just sort of drift until my bladder is bursting and shrieking at me to get out of bed, and it’s probably for the best if I don’t crawl back under the covers. Hunger curls and crawls low in my belly. The thought of eating is . . . worrisome.

I know this mood. If I start eating, I won’t stop. Not even when I’m full and stretching and pained, because that kind of pain makes more sense than this grief and rage that bleed under my skin.

I shower and dry my hair, make a note to ask Mum to refresh the streaks because there’s almost half an inch of root growth, and draw on eyeliner and lipstick with a heavy hand. Chavi taught me all the small tricks that make the difference between a challenge and a tease and a snarl. She always fell somewhere between challenge and tease, softened with shimmering white and gold powders. I usually brush on silver and white, but not today. Today is black and red and about as pissed off as you’d expect from that.

Once I’m dressed and I’m sure I’ve got the pepper spray easily accessible in my outer coat pocket, I leave the house for the chess island. The air’s so dry it hurts, and I have the feeling I’ll be using the tissues in the other pocket for a nosebleed sometime in the next couple of hours.

When I walk up onto the dead grass, Corgi looks up and whistles, soft and impressed. “You really do belong with us, don’t you, Blue Girl?” At my smile, sharp and brittle, he nods. “Come on, then. Happy hasn’t had a victory in weeks. Let him live up to his name.”

So I sit down opposite Happy, who looks sober and haunted, and play until he claims he’s pulled so far ahead of Corgi in their never-ending tally of victories that his friend will never catch up.

Corgi’s a good player, even against people who know what the shit they’re doing. If the tally is anything honest, Happy hasn’t got a chance.

But Corgi smiles, scratches the side of his nose, and says Happy shouldn’t sit too easy.

Landon starts with Yelp, down on the far end of the tables from me. When he shuffles down to take Steven’s challenge, it puts him next to me. I’d more or less decided to give him the benefit of the doubt going forward, and assume that he doesn’t mean to be creepy. Maybe he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. I’m just not going to engage.

Today, though, I’d really like to pepper spray him on principle, so I should probably go back to the instinctive plan of avoid, avoid, avoid.

Bracing my hand on Corgi’s shoulder, I clamber over the bench and stretch out the kinks and aches of sitting in the cold. “Come on, Corgi, show me how it’s done.”

He and Happy give me nearly identical grins, and he scoots over to take my empty seat. I hover over his shoulder for a while, watching the beginning of the game—I can tell by the fifth move that Happy is going to lose—until the men at the other end shuffle around. It’s easy to casually plop down across from Pierce, who tends to stay close enough to Gunny to keep an eye on the old man.

I play Pierce for a couple of games, then Yelp for one while Gunny naps into his hands in the corner. The girl in the car—Hannah, I learned my second day, Gunny’s youngest granddaughter—comes up once to check on him. She has a blood sugar strip in her fingers, and she slides her hand up under his sleeves to get the stick from his forearm. The device in her other hand is barely the size of an egg, but it reads the bloodied strip and gives her a number, which she notes into her phone.

I like Hannah, I think. Not that I’ve gotten to know her—she tends to stay in the car except when it’s time to test Gunny’s blood sugar—but because she never acts like this is a chore or an imposition. She bundles up and waits with her knitting or a book, occasionally looking up toward the pavilion to check on Gunny, and she seems to enjoy the other vets. They call her Miss Gunny, and she just rolls her eyes and tells me sensible people call her Hannah.

When Gunny wakes up with a start, he looks at me, his face still soft with sleep. “In the trenches today, Miss Priya?”

“Yes, sir. It happens sometimes.”

“It does.” He turns the board sideways so he can reach between the ranks of pieces. My heavy gloves are in my pocket, but it’s still cold enough that I’ve got a pair of knit arm warmers over most of my hand. I give it to him anyway, his skin coarse and paper-fine as his fingers close around mine. “You’re too young to stay there, though.”

He’s not asking. If I don’t want to tell him, I absolutely don’t have to, and he will not hold it against me in the slightest.

But Frank’s on my mind, Frank who had a hard time coming home after his war but was always unfailingly generous and wanted to help. Some days he couldn’t really deal with people, and that was fine, we let him be those days. He had a lot of those days after that night in the church.

“My sister was murdered a while back,” I whisper, hoping his ears are still sharp enough that I won’t have to repeat myself. Yelp and Jorge are focused on their game next to us. “I found her. Last night was a bit more . . . more present than past.”

He nods and gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “And now that you’re awake?”

“It’s still a bad day.”

“But you came out.”

“All of you know that kind of bad day, or you wouldn’t be here, either.”

He smiles, his entire face disappearing in crinkles and wrinkles and folds. “Thank you for coming on a bad day.”

I stay long enough to have a complete game with Gunny, then head into the store to get a drink for the way home. Landon follows me in.

Yay.

He stands behind me in line, and my discomfort ratchets up to anger when I realize I’ve got my thumb on the trigger for the pepper spray, my fingers wrapped around the leather case. I don’t like feeling vaguely endangered. I want a specific threat, something I can point to and say this and everyone understands, not a number of impressions that make women nod and men shake their heads.

“You look sad today,” he says eventually.

“I’m not.”

Sadness and grief aren’t the same thing. It’s why they have different words. Maybe it’s a subtle distinction, but we don’t keep a word in a language if it doesn’t still have a purpose of its own. Synonyms are never exact things.

“Are you sure?” he asks, stepping almost beside me.

“Yes.”

“It’s getting dark outside.”

“Yes.” And it is this time, the sky streaking indigo and the temperature dropping. I stayed later than I meant to, but it helped. The vets all helped, but I think I needed Gunny to reassure me that I wasn’t bringing them a burden.

“You shouldn’t be walking home all alone in the dark.”

I turn toward him a little and smile, too many teeth and not enough sweetness. “I’m fine.”

“There are bad people in the world.”

“I’m aware.”

I was only sort of aware of that before I was twelve. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget it.

The sparrow woman behind the counter doesn’t ask for my name this time. She just takes my payment and starts making the hot chocolate, adding more syrup than she’s probably supposed to.

“What if someone hurts you?” Landon presses, following me to the other end of the counter without ordering a drink.

Eddison sometimes jokes about getting me a Taser for my birthday. I’m starting to think I should take him up on it.

I ignore Landon and accept my drink from the barista, whose name tag is always hidden under her apron. I don’t bother to add vanilla or sugar this time, preferring the bitterness to continued interaction. But he still follows me between the tables, and my keys—and my pepper spray—are now outside my pocket.

Then I hear him yelp, and turn around to see him dripping with what used to be a large, very hot coffee, most of it up near his face and the open neck of his heavy shirt. Another man, taller and in a cable-knit sweater, apologizes profusely but in a way that sounds just a little insincere. He brushes at Landon’s shirt with a tiny napkin that soaks up nothing.

“I’ve got it!” snarls Landon, and stalks away still dripping.

The other man turns to me and smiles, and I can place him now, a handsome guy who sits in the corner with a book and sometimes a stack of paperwork. He’s probably in his upper thirties, well put together without seeming vain about it, and he’s not trying to hide the way his dark auburn hair is silvering at the temples. “I’m sorry, but he seemed to be bothering you.”

I let my hand slide back into my pocket, hiding the pepper spray from sight, but don’t let go of it quite yet. “He was.”

He pulls a handful of actual napkins from his pocket and kneels down to sop up what coffee didn’t cling to Landon. Rubbing another napkin over his hands to dry them, he pulls out his wallet and holds a card. “I recently designed the website for a shuttle service here in town. It’s mostly to help homebound folks to the store or doctors or other errands. If you ever feel uncomfortable, think about giving them a call.”

It’s a straightforward card, a simple logo centered along the top with the information printed neatly below. It includes a phone number and website, something I can at least research.

“Tell them Joshua sent you,” he adds.

“Thank you. I’ll keep it in mind.” I let go of my keys to take the card, tucking it into my opposite pocket with the tissues. I glance around for Landon, but he must still be in the bathroom or wherever he stalked off to, so I nod in place of goodbye and walk off.

I’ll have Mum check out the card later. It might be a good number to know if the weather turns while I’m out. There’s a bus system on the other side of town, but it doesn’t stop near enough to home to be useful, and a cab seems a little too self-indulgent.

I take a different way home than normal, my hand back on the pepper spray, and look around me before entering the neighborhood. Mum taught us caution from a young age, and she’s worked to make sure good sense doesn’t turn to paranoia. I’ve got a strong instinct for creeps, but she’s better at deciding whether or not to trust a good thing.

To make myself feel better, once my nose is unthawed I dig out Special Agent Ken from the suitcase where he usually lives and set him up against the window in the breakfast nook with a tiny plastic coffee mug. The snow outside is old and will probably be gone in a couple more days, but the street lights reflect rather nicely off of it, and it makes Special Agent Ken look about as wistful as a male Barbie can manage. He’s in the tiny version of the ugly Christmas sweater Mum and I sent Eddison last year, and the tiny one is actually a lot less ugly. There’s not enough space for the horrific details.

I snap a couple of shots with my camera, so I’ll have a good photo for later, but I take one with my phone, too, and send it to Eddison.

Half an hour later, when I’m back in my pajamas and ready to dig into schoolwork for the couple of hours before Mum gets home with dinner, I get a message back.

He wouldn’t think that white shit’s so pretty if he’d ever had to walk in it.

It makes me laugh, something I know I don’t do enough anymore. Eddison’s breed of comfort may be strange—and not at all comforting to most—but it’s familiar, acknowledging the bad day without pressing.

I used to wonder if the Quantico Three catching Chavi’s killer would end the nightmares. Now I think it won’t matter, that the nightmares will always be mine.

Eddison should be headed home. He’s already left the office, after an overlong day of sifting through paperwork and assessing new information from the ongoing investigation into the Garden and the MacIntosh family’s crimes. He can feel the dull heaviness in his bones, somewhere beyond tired but not quite to exhausted.

It’s not the hours, or even the deadening boredom of the paperwork that fatigues him so. It’s the content.

Some days it’s just a job. Other days . . . there are reasons so many good agents burn out. Most do, eventually.

He should be heading home, to rest, to fill his head with something other than images of dead girls in glass and resin. Instead, fresh coffee in hand from the shop down the block, he walks back to the FBI building and takes the elevator to his floor. It’s quiet there, the sea of cubicles empty except for one man snoring softly. It’s tempting to wake him up, but he’s got a pillow stuffed between his head and his desk, a blanket draped over his shoulders and chair like a cape.

You don’t prepare like that for sleeping at your desk unless there’s a reason you can’t go home. Eddison leaves him alone, and spares a hopeful thought that the poor bastard can work it out, whatever the problem is.

From the back corner of his desk, he grabs the stack of colorful folders that never gets put away, the binder clips straining to hold the papers and photos. The conference room will let him spread them all out, sixteen victim files and one that holds all their notes on the case as a whole. Sixteen is too many—far too many—but spring is coming, and another girl will die if they can’t find something to lead them to the killer.

He doesn’t want to see seventeen.

He grabs the first folder, flips it open, and starts reading to refresh all the details he can never quite forget. Maybe this will be the time he finds something new, something that connects in a way it didn’t before. Maybe this is the time he finally finds a lead.

“Looking for trouble?”

The voice makes him flinch, his elbow knocking against his cup. He makes a frantic dive for it as it tilts and wobbles, but he misses.

Aaaand there’s nothing in the cup.

Jesus, how long has he been here?

Looking up, he sees his partner’s amusement and scowls at him. “What are you doing here, Vic?”

“Came back to do some paperwork. Saw the light on.” Vic settles into a rolling chair, taking in the expanse of folders. They’ve migrated across the table, overlapping edges but kept carefully distinct. The only one out of order is Chavi’s, just to Eddison’s left.

“That’s how you always have your paperwork done?” Eddison asks. “You come back?”

“I go home for dinner so I can spend time with all my girls. Then, when the evening dissolves into homework or dates or movies on the couch, I sometimes come back to get some extra work done. You don’t need to sound so betrayed by it.”

Does he sound betrayed by it? Eddison reflects on that, then reluctantly decides that yes, yes, he probably does. Sometime over the past years, it might have been nice for the more experienced agent to give him that hint.

Vic reaches for the folder nearest him, gathering the photos into a neat stack and turning them facedown. “Do you really think you’re going to see anything you didn’t see the last twenty times you did this?”

Rather than answer, Eddison just looks at the folder in Vic’s hands.

“Fair point.” After a moment, Vic shuts the folder and slides it back in place. “Let’s try this a different way.”

“Meaning?”

“There are things that we take for granted because we already know the cases are connected. Let’s try to remove that bias. So. Here we are, slow day, an analyst researching on ViCAP brings us these folders and thinks we have a serial killer.” He looks expectantly at Eddison.

Eddison glowers back.

Sighing, Vic grabs the file with just their notes and sets it in the chair next to him. “I know you hate role-play, but it’s a useful investigative tool. Indulge me.”

“None of the cases share the same jurisdiction,” Eddison says, and his partner nods. “Different state every time, no geographic cluster or apparent comfort zone. The victims all live in or around cities, rather than more rural areas, but there’s nothing on a map to link them.”

“All right. What does link them?”

“Age clusters; they’re all in a four-year range, fourteen to seventeen. All in school, all female.”

Standing to stretch out over the table, Vic pulls the headshot to the top of each stack. Most are yearbook photos, though a few are posed at other occasions. Candid shots may say more about a person, but posed ones are more identifiable. “What else?”

Eddison tries to pretend he hasn’t seen these pictures so many times they’re emblazoned on the back of his eyelids, tries to pretend he doesn’t know anything about them. “They don’t fit a type,” he says eventually. “They’re all young and objectively pretty, but hair color, skin color, racial background, they’re all over the spectrum. Whatever makes them attractive to him as victims, it’s not how they look. Or not only how they look.”

“So we dig deeper.”

“I’m not at the academy.”

“I know.” Vic taps at a bright green folder. “And I know we did all this seven years ago with Kiersten Knowles. We came into this because someone else connected these cases, so there were things we simply assumed to be true because they were presented to us that way. What if finding something genuinely new means tucking into the things we don’t even realize we’re not seeing?”

“I need more coffee.”

“I’ll get it. You think.”

As Vic leaves the conference room, Eddison pulls one of the candids out of Chavi’s file and props it up against his empty cup. It’s almost the last picture of living Chavi, taken just two days before her murder. Priya’s twelfth birthday. All the girls and women at the neighborhood party, and some of the more obliging men, had flower crowns on, colorful ribbons spilling out from silk flowers and wire. Priya was all skin and bones then, near the end of a growth spurt that gave her height but not weight, her hips and ribs pressing against her clothing. Her too-sharp face was alight, though, bright and joyful, with her sister’s arms draped across her chest from behind. Whoever took the photo caught them in motion, their dark hair swinging around them, the red and blue streaks bold as the ribbons. Priya wore a crown of white roses, Chavi one of yellow chrysanthemums, the long petals almost like a fringed headband. Both wore cheerful sundresses and open sweaters, their feet bare in the grass.

Two days later, Chavi was dead.

So was that version of Priya.

Vic comes back and hands him a mug that says you’re my superhero. Eddison isn’t sure if that’s meant to be funny or if Vic just didn’t pay attention to what he was grabbing. The break-room kitchenette is home to any number of orphan mugs.

Lack of attention, he decides after a glance at his partner’s hand. Vic’s mug says he’s the world’s gratest mom, with a hunk of swiss cheese next to the words.

“Cause of death is the same in every case,” Eddison says, taking a cautious sip. It’s stark and bitter, definitely microwaved dregs, but it’s got a kick. “Slit throat. Most are clean, single cuts that run deep, a few are choppy, probably indicative of a higher level of rage. Multiple medical examiners suggest it’s most likely a smooth-edged hunting knife. Angle of the wound changes depending on the height of the victims, but all point to an attack from behind by someone around six feet tall. Left-to-right directionality says someone right-handed.”

“Before we get into the disposition of the bodies, what else is the same about the attacks? Physically, I mean.”

“That’s where we see two distinct victim profiles.” Eddison looks for his notes, realizes Vic still has the folder, and glares.

Vic just shakes his head and uses his mug to gesture at the spread of files on the table.

“Of the sixteen, one, two, four, seven . . . no, eight were raped, and beaten to varying degrees. Their clothing was torn, and either left on them or in a heap next to them. The other eight were not raped, no signs of sexual assault. Hints of bruising around their necks indicate they were probably choked to unconsciousness. Clothing was carefully removed and placed at a distance. To keep it clean?” Eddison skims quickly through the relevant medical reports. “No other signs of physical trauma on those eight.”

“And after death? What did he do with the bodies?”

“That’s what spurred the initial theory they were connected.” He pulls photos out of each file, still feeling like an idiot making a class presentation, but layers them so Vic can see. “Every victim was found in a church, even those who weren’t religious or overtly Christian. The churches themselves span a number of denominations. ME reports say the victims were not moved. Arranged, yes, but they were killed where they were found.”

Eddison thinks of the plain white Baptist church for Tereza’s funeral, the icy politeness with which the Kobiyashis greeted the agents, the outright rudeness they offered to Bliss and Inara.

Bliss snarled back, but it was Inara who opened the casket to set a few pages of folded sheet music under Tereza’s crossed hands.

Eddison runs a hand through his hair, scraping his blunt fingernails against his scalp. He needs to get a haircut soon; it’s getting long enough to curl. “They were all in roughly the same part of each church: between the altar space and the seating. They all had flowers on or around them, a unique flower for each victim.”

“Where did the flowers come from?”

There are pages upon pages of police interviews with florists in every folder. Some flowers were local to the area and in season, and could have been gathered in the wild by the killer. Others had to have been purchased, but were likely bought out of town to avoid suspicion. A few local flower shops had records of cash sales for the particular type of flower, but not enough to account for the number present at the scene. Even if he buys some in town, the rest are bought or found elsewhere.

But there was one exception. “Meaghan Adams, victim number fourteen, was found with camellias almost certainly purchased from her mother’s shop. Cash, no security cameras, and the clerk wasn’t paying enough attention to give a description other than ‘male, tall, and somewhere between thirty and sixty.’” He tries not to be irritated by that. Most people aren’t trained to actively observe, to notice and remember details of strangers.

“What else?”

“The murders all take place within a two-month period. The earliest is in mid-March, the latest almost mid-May. There’s something about the time of year, something about spring that sets this guy off.”

Standing up with a muted groan and a stretch, Vic reaches for the bowl of dry-erase markers on the table. Most of one wall is a whiteboard, currently taken up with bullet points of what appears to be a sexual-harassment seminar. Vic wipes off all of it with quick strokes and tosses the eraser to the floor. “All right. Let’s chart.”

It must be nearly midnight, but Eddison nods and opens the first file, clearing his throat to read aloud. “First known victim, Darla Jean Carmichael, age sixteen. Killed in Greater Glory Southern Baptist Church in Holyrood, Texas, outside of San Antonio, on the twenty-third of March. Zoraida Bourret . . .”

As Eddison reads off names and dates, along with any other details that jump out, Vic copies it onto the whiteboard, color coding the information. Green for locations and dates, blue for officers and agents on the cases, purple for family statements, red for the victims’ details. They’ve done this before, on this case and others: put everything up on a single page and hope to see something that gets lost in the shuffle of papers.

There’s a question the instructors pose to every cohort at the academy: why is it more difficult to find someone who kills less often?

The answer has a lot of parts. A pattern that’s spread out is harder to identify. Pieces of the signature get lost. A spree killer rushes and leaves clues behind. A serial murderer might take longer to make mistakes.

In Eddison’s mind, it always comes back to control. The more time passes between kills, the more in control of himself a killer is, the more likely to plan, to be careful. Someone who only kills once a year isn’t in a hurry, isn’t desperate and likely to fuck up. A patient man isn’t worried about getting caught.

Eddison is not a patient man. He’s waited too long already to tell Priya—to tell all the victims’ families—that they’ve got the bastard who killed their girls. He doesn’t want to add another folder to the pile, another name to the list.

He’s just not sure there’s a way to avoid it.

It’s practically March.

Her name is Sasha Wolfson, and you see her for the first time when she nearly crashes her uncle’s convertible. The top is down and the crisp spring wind rips through her hair, waving it all around and into her face. She pulls over abruptly so she can knot it back, but she’s laughing.

She has a wonderful laugh.

Her uncle is laughing, too, even as he hands her a scarf to tie over her hair, and he patiently explains things like lane changes and merges and blind spots. He’s teaching her to drive.

You follow that laugh for weeks, through driving lessons and after-school walks and the weekends she spends working with her family’s landscaping business. She’s so good with the flowers; there are always some in her hair. Her parents nearly always give her the delicate work to do, twining slender, fragile vines through latticework and repotting the less hardy plants. She loves the butterfly gardens best, and sometimes she makes a coronet of honeysuckles.

You can smell them in the air when she walks by, the tiny flowers bright against her red hair.

Her sister is a wild girl, you learn. Off at college, screwing everything that will stand still long enough. Her poor parents, you hear, and the midnight calls from policemen. Drugs, and car crashes, and drinking. At least they have Sasha.

At least they have a good girl they can be proud of.

But you know how girls can get as they grow older. Darla Jean was a good girl, until she wasn’t. Zoraida withstood temptations, and is protected from them now, but Leigh . . . Leigh Clark was always a vicious girl, and the world is well rid of her. When Sasha gets her license, when she can go off on her own in a car, who knows what she’ll get up to?

No. Her parents may have failed their elder daughter, but they’ve done well by Sasha, as she does well by them. They deserve to know that Sasha will always be a good girl.

It’s almost summer, and her coronet of honeysuckle is a thick crown today, her hair woven through it in places until it’s all up, precariously balanced, somewhere between elegant and untamed. This is a fairy-tale maiden, and all nature bends to please her. You’ve read fairy tales, though. You know the prince comes, and the princess is no longer pure. There’s a kiss to wake, a kiss to cure, a kiss to keep. Princesses become queens, and there’s never been a queen undeserving of burning.

Red tendrils, dark with sweat, escape from the crown and plaster to her neck, her throat, as she tends the flower beds outside the church. She stands and stretches, heads into the dark, quiet church for a drink, a chance to cool off.

And you follow, because you know what happens to princesses who aren’t protected from the world.

After, you pluck a single flower from the disintegrating crown and place it on your tongue. Under the copper shock of blood, you can taste the sweetness of honeysuckle.