YOUR EXPERIENCE CHANGES WHEN YOU know the end is near. Five days, Don said, until we know.

I feel like I’m glowing radioactively, trying to process things three times as fast, keeping myself ready to spring if my phone rings. Only at the crosswalks do I let myself process how hard my heart is thumping. The evening of Don’s call, when I go downstairs to make some toast, I instinctively flick on the hallway lights and wait ten seconds. I’m coming, I imagine the lights say. I hold my metal baton out in front of me, my fingers wrapped underneath it, ready to lunge and jut, in case there’s an intruder. It’s crazy, I know, but eight years ago, it seemed crazy that, after so many decades of silence, the sheer force of my interest would bend reality enough to yield an answer. So who’s to say what’s rational?

It’s no surprise that I can’t sleep. I feel powerless—helpless to change the outcome, helpless to know it—and overwhelmed. I desperately want to call Boyd, but I promised Don I would keep the news between us. I run through the scenarios in my head. If it’s someone who’s alive, maybe this gives police enough time to make the arrest. Then again, if it’s someone who’s alive, why would they risk the leak and not just wait until the person was arrested to let Don know? What if it’s not someone I’ve considered? What if after I learn the name of the killer, I still don’t know why she was killed?

Five days.

I look back at where I started. How quickly everything became a giant puzzle, a world of secrets, where every fact had a double meaning and everyone seemed to have a secret life. The speculative quicksand on which my story was based seemed so limitless that sometimes I had to remind myself that Jane did die and someone did kill her.

I can’t get over the timing. That morning, I had been struggling with the question of how to write this book without an answer. Could there be resolution when I didn’t have a solution? And here, in the most deus ex machina of moves, reality was interceding to provide one.

Five days to live in a world where it could still be anyone.