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house?’
    â€œMy house is a mess. The blood. Who’s going to clean up the blood?”
    â€œDon’t worry about your house.”
    â€œPeople are going to see it. After the funeral. After the funeral when, when . . .” Merodie dropped her chin against her chest. Her entire body began to tremble, and she gripped the small table so tightly that I was sure she would have overturned it if it hadn’t been bolted to the floor. She grunted and groaned and cried out in unbridled anguish; she painted the walls with her suffering. Eli Jefferson might have been dead for two weeks, but the pain of it was fresh in Merodie’s heart. G. K. patted her shoulder and said, “There, there.” She looked at me like she wanted me to do something about it. I looked at the door and wished I could wait outside.
    It took a while for Merodie to come back to us. She chanted, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as she wiped her tears with the sleeve of her olive-green jump suit.
    â€œI know you’re upset,” G. K. told her, “but you must stop worrying about Eli and start worrying about yourself.”
    â€œI can’t,” Merodie said. “He was everything to me. He was my last chance.”
    â€œLast chance for what?”
    Merodie didn’t answer. She sniffed and dried her eyes and took several deep breaths, all while studying G. K. as if she were a curiosity, a new exhibit at the Minnesota Zoo. Then she turned her attention on me.
    â€œDo I know you?” It was the second time she had asked the question.
    â€œI was at your home the other day, the day you were arrested.”
    She nodded as if it were all coming back to her. I doubted that it was. Yet, while her mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around me, it was becoming abundantly clear to her that she was in jail, specifically the Anoka County Correctional Facility, and that she was in deep trouble.
    â€œThey think I killed him, don’t they?” Merodie said.
    â€œKilled who?” G. K. was testing her. Merodie had been fading in and out all through our conversation. At one moment she was aware enough to answer G. K.’s questions clearly; at the next she was unsure who G. K. was.
    â€œEli,” Merodie answered. “Eli Jefferson. They think I killed him. That wonderful man.”
    Merodie began pacing across the tiny room—four steps, turn, four steps, turn. When I first met her outside her home she had reminded me of the female lead in a zombie movie,
The Night of the Living Dead
—the original, not the remake—incoherent, oblivious even to where she was. Now, even though her eyes were red and blotchy and her face still had the same tint as the olive green jumpsuit that she wore, she moved like a woman alive with hope. More than that. Clean and sober, she was pretty, and I noticed for the first time that she was also young—no older than thirty-five—and that her features seemed delicate, as if she could be bruised by a hard wind.
    It’s amazing what a few hot meals and a good night’s sleep can do,
my inner voice concluded.
    â€œWho is Eli Jefferson?” G. K. asked.
    â€œMy fiancé.”
    â€œDid you kill him?”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    â€œNo. Uh-uh. From now on, if someone asks you if you killed Eli Jefferson, you answer . . .”
    â€œNo.” Merodie’s shout bounced off the walls.
    â€œExactly.”
    â€œI mean it,” Merodie insisted. “I didn’t do it.”
    â€œWhat did you do?”
    Merodie hesitated before answering in a low, childlike voice. “I hit him with a bottle.”
    â€œWhat did you say?”
    â€œI hit him with a bottle.”
    â€œWhat kind of bottle?”
    â€œWhat kind? I don’t know. A bottle, you know, a beer bottle.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œWhat do you mean, how?”
    â€œTell me what happened,” G. K. said.
    â€œI threw a bottle at him and