Page 93 of Peak Cruelty

I press my ear to it.

Nothing.

Good.

I pull the pen from the journal I wasn’t supposed to keep.

And with slow, careful precision?—

—I carve a word into the wall like maybe I might forget.

Vance.

47

Vance

Isleep like I’ve been drugged.Maybe I have.

The next morning—or what I think is morning—I wake to the sound of eggs hissing in a pan and a voice low-singing a song I don’t recognize.Something old.Southern.Not nostalgic.

She doesn’t greet me when I shuffle into the kitchen.Just points to a chair with her chin like it’s an arrangement we agreed on.

I sit.I breathe.I try not to wince.

The notebook is still in my lap.

I’m not sure when I took it out, or why I’ve been holding it all night, but my knuckles are still white around it like I thought someone might come for it in the dark.

She sets a plate in front of me.Biscuits with burned edges, everything over-peppered.I eat anyway.

“You keep looking at that thing like it’s gonna offer you absolution,” she says, not facing me.

I place it on the table beside the plate.“It won’t.”

“Didn’t think so.”

She’s not wrong.But she’s not right, either.It’s just names, theories, pieces of other people’s lives that stuck out enough to warrant attention.Women who fit the pattern.Munchausen by proxy, or something close to it.It’s more than a pattern now.It’s pathology.A trail of kids whose lives are at risk.

Rachel’s name is still on the third page.Circled, not crossed.

I run my thumb across her name.Not just because I want her to pay for what she’s doing, but because she’ll know how to get to Marlowe.

“You gonna sit there and stare or actually do something?”the woman asks, wiping her hands on a towel.

“I'm not ready yet.”

She pours herself a cup of coffee.Stares out the window.“No one is.But you look like a man who doesn’t get to stay broken.”

I almost laugh.Almost.

Instead, I set the fork down.The pain’s shifted now—less fire, more glass.Every breath comes with splinters.

“You want to tell me her name?”the woman asks.

I glance up.Don’t answer.

“You say nothing, but you keep that thing on your lap like a photo album.I figured she’ll be in there.Dead center.”

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