THE MORNING AFTER DON’S NO-news call, I wake up early and scan my phone for updates. There’s an email from him. Again, it’s strange—stiff and formal. He says he’s going to call me around 11:30 a.m. my time.

I wait for hours, and then, a few minutes after the appointed time, I text him, because my impatience is turning the suspense into a kind of purgatory.

He calls right away. His voice sounds full, like he’s barely containing a smile. “I have some news, and I thought I would call you. I’ll just tell you what it is, and then you can react. Boyd called last night.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He knows what we want to know, and here it is.”

It takes me a second to comprehend the enormity of what I’m about to find out.

“It was a rape-murder—by a stalker.” He says it flat and pauses to let it sink in. Her murderer was “just some random killer.”

The word random feels heavy and dangerous, like a pinball. I watch it dart around, shattering the scaffolding of suspicion that had built up around Karl. Gramly. Poor Lee, who might have died wondering if people thought it was him.

There was semen at the scene. That’s how they matched it. And the assailant died in prison in 2001.

“Oh my god,” I say, unable to find any other words.

“I know. I told Ruth, and she started to cry. It’s so different and awful. You’ll come to terms with it however you come to terms with it, but I’m still sort of chewing on it. Apparently the guy—I mean they don’t know, of course, ’cause he’s dead—but they have placed him in Cambridge at the time, so they seem quite certain. But it would seem he waited until Jim left, or Jane went home from our apartment, because that was the last thing. And then just went in. Probably the whole sequence of actions that we all thought happened, happened, except for the rape part.”

I wanted there to be more of a story so that it wasn’t so awful. “It seems just even more senseless than I—” I trail off, lost in the eddy of, It was random? It was senseless? It could have been anyone?

He had been following her. He waited until Jim left. He let himself in. He beat her. He raped her. I never wanted to imagine her scared or tortured or in pain. I had let myself believe that she was knocked unconscious before she was beaten, and maybe she didn’t even see her killer. That she maybe only felt the sharp surprise of the first hit before she passed out. The randomness forces me to confront the awful fact that she might have suffered.

Look, it says.

I can’t. I don’t want to. I feel awful in the absence of mystery, of narrative echo, of symmetry or rhyme or sense.

Don fills the silence.

He tells me he doesn’t know the culprit’s name. He says that he, like Boyd, will not be at the press conference in Boston. The authorities are going to put on a show, and Don doesn’t want to be their “trained monkey” for another performance of this story.

Unlike Boyd, though, who said that as a minister, it was his job to pray for both Jane’s and the assailant’s souls, Don is far from there yet. He is still grappling with how much he had depended on the mystery to shield himself from the horror of what happened. “All of my elaborate structures have collapsed. Just as if an earthquake had knocked them all down,” he says. “I was invested in a puzzle that involved a lot of people, and archaeology, and departmental dynamics, and people hiding their sexuality…And now I find out no, it was some son-of-a-bitch who walked in off the street, broke her door, raped her, killed her.” He feels brutalized by the ugly, unadorned facts and by the realization that he had betrayed himself, seduced by a story he preferred to believe.

“Stop the fairy land,” he scolds himself.