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everywhere and I can’t see myself ever packing any of it away. Her coffee cup is still on the bench, the bottom 10 percent still there, cold and manky. Toast crumbs form a trail across the kitchen floor. Makeup on the bathroom vanity, her towel, still damp, hanging on the rail. Jodie is missing and she’s here all at the same time, the house waiting for her to walk in, her husband waiting for the same thing. There’s an outfit lying on the bed; she must have been ready to wear one thing, then changed her mind. Jodie is always like that, she’s always one minute deciding to . . .
    Was. It’s “was” now.
    “Jesus,” I whisper, and sit down on the edge of the bed. I pick up her top and hold it against my face and cry into it. What do I do with her clothes? Keep them? Give them away?
    I don’t know when I’m supposed to think those kind of things, what kind of person it makes me for realizing it now. Do I do the washing and hang her clothes back up? Do I go to work next week? Do I leave Jodie’s clothes lying about the floor until after the funeral, then pack them up? My bosses at work don’t even know what’s happened. They know I went for lunch and haven’t come back.
    I walk up and down the hallway—I just need somebody to tell me what to do.
    I take off my clothes and lay them on the bed next to Jodie’s. A more creative man might study the bloodstains and find patterns in them, shapes of animals or boats, but all I see is my wife as she lay on the ground bleeding. They’re ruined. I roll them into a ball, then find myself coming to a complete standstill. I stare at them for a while. The cuffs are the bloodiest, then the arms, then the front. One of the buttons is missing. There isn’t any blood on the back at all. I straighten them out and hang them up.
    I take a long shower, blood streaking off my skin, the penguin shower radio quiet as it watches me. I stare in the mirror at the large bruise on my face from the blow I took. The skin is slightly torn up, and one of my eyes doesn’t open fully—which I hadn’t even noticed until now. I don’t want to know this man anymore because this man got his wife killed. I picture it all happening over and over. I think about the bank teller, the way the shooter leveled his gun at her. Then I think about the 4 percent chance I came up with earlier when figuring the odds of Jodie being the volunteer, and realize it’s a false statistic since there wasn’t any probability involved. There would have been, if I hadn’t shouted out. If I’d kept quiet then Jodie would have had as much chance as anybody of living or dying—but I took that chance and turned it into a certainty. And why? Why the hell did I shout out? Schroder said it was to save somebody. Maybe that was it. Maybe I thought I could make a difference. Only thing I know is I was as surprised as everybody else—it didn’t sound like meand wasn’t the kind of thing I thought I’d ever do. Probably not the kind of thing anybody thought I’d ever do—the son of a serial killer trying to save a life. Well, Mission Accomplished. That woman is alive and Jodie is dead—I traded one life for another. This is what it’s like to play God, I suppose—but without the ability to do any good.
    When the phone rings it turns out to be a reporter. So does the second call. And the third. Before taking it off the hook I phone Nathaniel and Diana—Jodie’s parents. Nat answers and he’s already crying before I can say much.
    “I don’t really know what to say, Eddie,” he says, his voice close to breaking. I’ve never heard him cry before. Nat, this solid, near-retirement-age man who could break a man in half, is weeping into the phone, he sounds like a child. “But we’ve been talking, and we think, we think that both you and Sam might, um, might be best staying with us tonight. Then she can stay with us tomorrow to give you a chance to . . . to get things organized.”
    “I don’t know. I think I need