I glanced nervously at Titus, who smiled reassuringly and urged me on. Slowly, I made my way across the room to Roylynn Prouix.

She turned her face to me and smiled as I approached. It was a lovely smile, but different from her sister’s. Where Hailey’s had always been filled with a sad, calculating irony, this smile was guileless and genuine. I had adored Hailey’s calculating smile, which evidenced so many strange depths, but after the multitude of ways I had been twisted and turned since first I saw it, I found Roylynn’s all the more radiant.

“Miss Prouix?” I said.

She continued to smile without saying anything, and I began to worry.

“My name is Victor Carl.”

No response, just that smile. Was there anything behind it? Was the guilelessness I had so admired just an instant before nothing but a lobotomized emptiness? I stared for a moment, overcome with a brief horror at what I imagined might be lacking in the woman before me.

“You, I suppose, are the visitor I’ve been told to expect,” she said finally, in a voice curved by the same accent as affected Hailey’s voice in her unguarded moments.

I breathed a great sigh of relief that someone was at home in the mansion. “Yes, that’s right. I am so sorry about what happened to your sister.”

The smile faded, she looked away to stare again out the window. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

“I knew her in Philadelphia.”

She turned quickly to peer at me. “Really. Tell me, was she happy in Philadelphia?”

It was a setup for a joke, but I resisted. “It’s hard to say, she was a complicated woman, but I think there were moments of happiness.”

She smiled again. “Well, I’m glad to hear that at least.”

“Did she keep in touch with you?”

“Oh, yes. We talked frequently. She often called to see how I was doing, to ask about my day. She was always a very concerned sister.”

“So you knew about Guy Forrest.”

“Pardon?”

“Guy Forrest. Guy and your sister were living together. They were engaged to be married.”

“No, she never mentioned him. I’m sure she would have, if she was really planning to marry him. But generally when we talked, she was more interested in how I was doing.”

“Mr. Forrest was indeed engaged to your sister. There was a proposal, an acceptance, a ring. But now the state has accused him of killing her.”

“Really? I hadn’t heard. That is truly shocking. But I’m sure this Mr. Forrest did no such thing. Men didn’t kill Hailey, they killed for Hailey.”

I was taken aback by that comment, and the cheeriness with which it was dispensed.

“Sit down, Mr. Carl,” she said, gesturing me to a spot at the other end of the couch. “No need to stand over me like that.”

“You should know, Miss Prouix, I’m a lawyer representing Guy Forrest in the murder case. I’ve come to ask you some questions.”

“It’s not contagious, is it, being a lawyer?”

“Excuse me?”

“I won’t start babbling in Latin or start charging for phone calls if you get too close, will I?”

“I can’t guarantee it, but no, I don’t think so.”

“Well, then, I think maybe we can risk it.” She gestured again to the other end of the couch, and I sat.

She shifted to face me, still holding her thin black book, dog-eared and dirty, still smiling, kindly now, with a deep assurance, and I thought suddenly that her being here had to be a mistake. Had to be. She was smart and charming and funny and full of kindness. It was quite a shift from my thinking her lobotomized only a few moment ago, but my whole experience in that place had proved disorienting, and the emotions I was feeling, the Pavlovian love that still clutched at me, made me certain. I didn’t want at that moment to talk about Hailey or Guy or even poor dead Jesse Sterrett. My basest instincts kicked in and I wanted to talk about her. I wanted to chat her up like I would chat up a cutie in a bar.

“What’s that you’re reading?” I asked.

She took tighter hold of the black volume in her lap. “It’s my favorite book. I read it over and over.”

“It must be something fun,” I said, twisting my head to read the battered spine. “Well, maybe not. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.”

“Do you know of him?”

“Hawking. Isn’t he that guy in the wheelchair?”

“Yes. He’s marvelous. I think I’m a little bit in love with him, though I hear he’s terrible to his wives. He has Lou Gehrig’s disease, and he was supposed to have been dead years ago, but instead he sits in that chair and lets his mind wander out to the far edges of the universe. And the strange thing is that in writing about what he sees there, it is as if he is writing the story of my life.”

“Your life?”

“Do you care much for physics, Mr. Carl?”

“E equals MC squared and all that?”

“Yes, and all that.”

“No, I don’t, actually. I don’t understand it. But how is that the story of your life?”

“You know that the universe is expanding at tremendous speed. Of course you do. Can’t you feel it? I can, every moment of every day I feel everything rushing away from me.”

I thought suddenly of the way the points of darkness had rushed away from me during my sleepless nights and the terror that engendered. What must it be like to feel that every moment of every day?

“All this… disintegration,” she said, “is an aftereffect of the big bang.”

“The big bang?”

She leaned forward now, as if she had something urgent to relate to me, as if she were proselytizing about some great new religion that would save my soul. “The big bang. The very beginning of time, when the universe was formed out of a single great explosion. Before that, nothing happened that mattered, because it had no effect on what happened after. And after, nothing was ever the same again, because the explosion just kept hurtling everything far, far away.”

“And that happened to you?”

“Yes. Of course. I thought you said you knew my sister. It happened to her, too. But at some point all this hurtling away is going to stop. It’s slowing down already and the force of gravity is at work every moment and someday, someday soon, the universe is going to stop expanding and slowly, slowly begin to contract. And then the contraction will speed up, speed up, speed up, until boom.” She smashed her palms together. “The big crunch.”

“The big crunch?”

“Yes. And that will be the end of everything. The end of all time, because nothing that happens afterward will be affected by anything that happened before.”

“And that’s coming soon?”

“We can only hope,” she said with a bright smile and a twinkle in her eye.

I wondered just then if she was putting me on. She must have been, and I smiled back at her even as I was feeling a confusing sadness.

“Is that what happened to Jesse Sterrett?” I said. “The big crunch?”

She seemed taken aback at the name. She turned her head and stared for a moment out the window.

“Is he in your book, too?” I said.

Without looking at me, she nodded and then looked down, opening the battered book in her lap. The pages were badly smudged, as if each had been fingered hundreds of times. She paged through the volume, stopping now and then, her attention caught by certain passages, in the way that some page through the Bible. She stopped finally and lifted the book to show it to me.

Chapter 6: “Black Holes.”

“I think maybe,” I said, slowly, as if to a child, “we should put away the book and just talk.”

“Do you know what a black hole is? It is something so massive, something with a gravity so dense, that nothing can escape it, not even light. That’s why they say it is black. Generally it is a star that collapses in on itself. It has to be just the right size, and then, when it is done burning, it just contracts into the tiniest ball of matter. Anything that comes too close falls in and gets ripped apart before disappearing forever.”