But, Adam—Adam wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t due until Christmas Eve. Twenty-two years ago, when almost no one had a cell phone or e-mail, there were gaps and mysteries in communication. He’d said he wouldn’t be in Belleville until Sunday morning. She had no reason to doubt that.

And the fact is, Gregg probably wouldn’t have been found guilty of a capital crime if he had shot Polly instead of Adam. When a husband kills his estranged wife, it’s just love gone wrong. When he kills the handsome bystander who’s trying to break up the fight—that’s when things get serious.

A month later, Polly, looking for a tampon, found the jewelry box that Adam had hidden. When she had the ring appraised, she was tempted to sell it, but she couldn’t bear to part with it. She has never worn it. She keeps it in a safe-deposit box for the day when Jani falls in love. She hopes against hope that Jani will pick a good man.

For her part, Jani insists she’ll never marry. Jani says she has to be responsible for Joy’s care when Polly is gone. But neither Polly nor Joy wants Jani to live that way, to see her sister as a burden that requires swearing off earthly pleasures. Joy is a joy, everybody’s favorite, the heart of the family, a truly old soul. Now thirty-six, she communicates with an iPad, and it amazes Polly how funny she can be, her gift for wordplay and poetry. It makes no sense, but Joy, whose movement is limited in every sense of the word, reminds Polly of footloose Adam. She is just so very present, day to day. And it was proven long ago that Joy doesn’t need Polly. It’s Polly who needs Joy.

Besides, Polly can’t imagine being gone. She will live forever. That’s her curse. She’s indestructible. She is She, she is the Leech Woman.

Only, unlike the Leech Woman, Polly killed another woman, and lived.

She was going to confess to Adam about Cath. Eventually. She believed he would understand, once he had all the facts. And she would have left Irving out of the whole mess if Cath’s brother-in-law could have stopped sniffing around. It was just another story that Polly had to work without overworking. She knew things about Irving (true). He had hired a private detective to follow her (true). The fire in her apartment was exactly like one Ditmars had set, years ago (true). A fire she had heard them plotting. (Not so true, but she was willing to perjure herself on that one detail.) There was no injustice in locking up Irving Lowenstein for a crime from which he did profit. But it never came to that. Irving Lowenstein had a fatal heart attack a few weeks before his much-delayed trial.

Everyone is dead. Except Polly.

She had yearned to tell Adam everything, if only to test his love for her. But to do that, she would have been forced to share the worst parts about her marriage to Ditmars, the most shaming details. How she knew of his crimes, the people he had killed, but did nothing until she came to believe he would harm her and Joy. How he liked to take her curling iron and hold it against her flesh, demanding that she not scream, teaching her resilience until she learned to stay silent even when he gave her a third-degree burn on her thigh. How, with increasing frequency toward the end, he would choke her during sex.

And she liked it.

Not because being deprived of oxygen heightened her pleasure, as Ditmars claimed it would, but because, for a few moments, she allowed herself the fantasy of dying. It beckoned, her only real hope of escape.

Then she would think about Joy, remember that she was not allowed to die, not yet, and she would scratch and cough her way back to life, Ditmars laughing all the while.

She had managed to forget that, almost. The curling iron, the choking, what it was like to lie beneath a man, sex and death mingling, until it was impossible to identify which release you wanted more.

It all came back to her when Cath, enraged by a simple retort, leaped at Polly, knocking her to the ground. When Cath tried to put her hands around Polly’s throat, Polly felt no confusion. She knew in that moment she wanted to live by any means necessary.

They rolled and grappled on the kitchen floor, equal matches. But at some point, Cath got on top and reached for her throat again. People say they see red when angry, but in Polly’s memory, the room began to turn green, more of a greenish-gray yellow, the color of the sky before a late-summer storm. Dots floated in front of her eyes. Unlike Ditmars, Cath wasn’t going to stop in time. She wasn’t even pretending to be interested in Polly’s pleasure.

Polly squirmed across the floor, inch by inch, until they were under her metal table. Once in the table’s shadow—knowing she would have one chance, it was like holding that knife over Ditmars’s chest as it rose and fell with his snores—she bucked as hard she could, driving Cath’s head into the underside of the metal table again and again. Her only thought was to dislodge her, to make her let go.

But once again, Polly’s aim was true, her strength superhuman. Cath’s skull cracked on the third or fourth blow. She collapsed on Polly, heavier than the weight of any man she had ever known.

Polly’s first instinct was to run. She could take Cath’s keys, steal her car, drive to a bus station or train station, disappear. But she would have to run forever, sacrificing her dream of a life with Joy and Jani. And it was an accident, self-defense, not her fault. Only who would believe her? How many times is a woman allowed to defend herself? In Polly’s experience, not even once.

She had time. Not much, but enough to calm down, make a plan. She took a shower, not worrying about the clothes she was leaving behind, the blood on the dress she’d been wearing. If her plan worked, it would take all evidence with it. If it didn’t—she refused to consider that possibility. She put on her favorite dress, chose her sandals, despite knowing they were her least practical shoes. They were too pretty to lose. She fastened her rose necklace from the thrift store around her neck, only on a velvet ribbon, the better to hide the marks left by Cath’s fingers. She turned on the pilot, closed the windows, left candles burning near the curtains, made sure the pink scarf on her bedside lamp was touching the bulb. If enough gas built up before the fire got going, nothing would be left standing.