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I am Jamie . . .
    But Dr. Brady couldn’t possibly understand.
    She said, “Look, Sam, I know you don’t want Jamie to leave. But you have to trust me. You have to try it. Please. For me.”
    She had such kind eyes. The kindest eyes anyone could ever have.
    “All right. I’ll try it.”
    Dr. Brady was right: it worked.
    Jamie was gone, but somehow, that was okay. Everything was okay—especially when that final sentence had been served and handcuffs and inmate jumpsuits became relics of the past.
    “You’ll never go to jail again, Sam,” Dr. Brady promised on that last day. “You’ve got your life back.”
    Back? I never had a life, never thought I could.
    A normal life, the kind of life other people—normal people—get to live. A life spent working hard and hoarding every spare cent, saving up to hire the best lawyer in the world to get Jerry out of prison . . .
    And now . . .
    It was all for nothing.
    Jerry is gone. He never even realized he had a chance—that he hadn’t been abandoned by his father to waste away the rest of his life behind bars.
    I was going to surprise him, one day soon. Go visit him. Remind him I promised to take care of him, and that I didn’t forget. I was going to get him out of there . . .
    But it’s too late now.
    Jerry took his own life before he could be rescued.
    The news was devastating, and in its wake, the whole world came crashing down. Suddenly, it was all so pointless. Work, money, medicine . . .
    For years, there had been regular visits to the Albany mental health clinic that wrote prescriptions and set up the obligatory follow-up appointments. But the doctors there weren’t nearly as engaging as Dr. Brady had been; not nearly as invested in their patients’ treatment. There was a lot of turnover at the clinic; you couldn’t really count on seeing the same shrink from one visit to the next.
    For a long time, though, that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered in all those years except that the medicine helped. Now, with Jerry dead, nothing mattered at all.
    The big blue capsules went swirling down the toilet in an impulsive flush, and Jamie came back shortly after, whispering, taunting, teasing, wanting to take over again.
    Now Jamie is all I have.
    She’s inside me again, and she’s becoming me again and I’m becoming her, and that’s okay. That’s how it used to be. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
    And this time, I don’t need any medicine and I don’t need Dr. Brady to tell me that none of this is my fault.
    No, because there are two other people who are to blame for destroying Jerry: Rocky Manzillo, the homicide detective who got him to confess, and the prosecution’s star witness, Allison Taylor—now Allison MacKenna.
    She was supposed to die, too, ten years ago. Remember?
    I know, Jamie. I know she was.
    We were close, so incredibly close . . .
    I know. We almost had her. But somehow, she got away.
    At the trial, Allison told the court that she had seen Jerry furtively leaving the Hudson Street apartment building the night Kristina Haines died.
    There should have been video evidence, too, from the building’s hallway surveillance cameras. But the footage for that particular time frame was mysteriously missing.
    The prosecution implied that Jerry obviously took it and destroyed it in an effort to cover his tracks. After all, he had the keys to the office where the videotape was kept.
    But Jerry wasn’t the only person in the world who had access.
    I did, too.
    No one, though, not even the defense, wasted much time considering that someone other than Jerry might have stolen the incriminating tape. Jerry had confessed; there was a witness; there were no other viable suspects; he had a clear motive for every one of those murders.
    Well, for three of them, anyway.
    Kristina Haines and Marianne Apostolos had spurned his advances.
    Lenore Thompson, Jerry’s mother, had been cold and abusive.
    As for the fourth victim . . . Hector Alveda was a