28

The morgue was in the basement of the hospital off a corridor adjacent to the kitchen. They didn’t bring Victoria into the actual room, but instead showed her to a white closet-sized space with a small table and single chair. On a closed-circuit screen, a woman with curly white-blonde hair and a white coat pulled back a stiff white sheet with detached precision.

Victoria had to wonder about the unintended symbolism. Everyone associated white with weddings, but in many cultures white was the color of death. Here she was, wrapped up in the void, snow on the ground and a pale form on a cold, metal table.

Warren.

Victoria whimpered, a noise she would deny until her own dying day,and—oh, she was going to puke. Grabbing the wall, she steadied herself and waited for the sensation to pass. Sweat stuck to her forehead. Her muscles trembled as she wiped her lips.

Meyers set a trash can down at her feet and signaled to the woman. The TV went black, but Victoria could still see the outline of Warren’s shape behind her eyelids. Focusing on her breathing, she inhaled deeply and released her breaths in shaky huffs. After a few rounds, the worst of the dizziness had passed, and Meyers escorted her out of the room.

She led her slowly to the cafeteria, guiding her wordlessly through the sterile dimly lit corridor. For the hour, it was relatively busy. Nurses and a spattering of visitors grabbed quick bites, hunched over their tables on phones or tablets.

Meyers stuck a Styrofoam cup into Victoria’s hand. “It’s shitty but sobering.”

Victoria would’ve preferred a whiskey and ginger. A bottle or four of Cabernet. Sobering was seeing Warren on that large baking sheet. His skin—she’d never seen a color quite like that before, somewhere between gray and dishwater. The place where his eyes should’ve been haunted her already. They had done their best to cover the area without hiding the rest of his face, but that only served to remind her of what was missing.

Victoria sipped the black tar masquerading as coffee with her eyes closed, acutely aware of how much she relied on them. It was funny to her then: how once you started thinking about a certain part of your body, you couldn’t stop. Like an unreachable itch. Or your tongue moving around in your mouth.

Every dust mote, every lash, every blink. The muscles holding them in place. The individual veins spidering across their bloodshot surfaces.

The black holes hidden behind Warren’s sunken lids. Victoria wouldn’t be shaking that image anytime soon. Whoever had attacked him had to be deranged, she thought. Maybe a legitimate psychopath.

No sane person could inflict that level of harm and walk away unscathed. Unbothered.

She understood that some might say she was hypocritical. Yes, fine, she’d wanted Warren dead, and yes, she’d expected to be okay after he was gone, not plagued by the act itself. Lady Macbeth’s bloody hands were not her own.

This was all true, but the situations were not the same.

Killing Warren wasn’t a long-unfulfilled homicidal urge. Victoria would have been acting out of necessity. She wouldn’t have carved out his eyes and left him to die alone. She wasn’t cruel. She was a rational person capable of feeling things.

“Are you ready?” Meyers asked, finishing a text and shoving her phone into her pocket.

Victoria nodded at Meyers and stood on wobbly legs. She tossed the cup in the garbage and followed the detective out of the hospital, neither one speaking about Warren Tate.

The fresh air was welcome, and she inhaled greedily, blinking against the first hazy rays of sunshine dawning on the horizon. The snow had stopped, leaving that icy serenity that comes in the first snow’s wake.

As gruesome as it may have been, Warren had died on a beautiful day, after all.