I’m thinking what Heidi would say if she knew what was happening right now, how it would make her feel. Heidi who is wholesome, generous beyond belief; Heidi who refuses to smash a spider with a shoe.

“Stop,” I say, pushing her away, gently at first, and then harder. “Stop, Cassidy,” I say, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this to Heidi.”

I want Heidi. I miss Heidi.

I miss my wife.

But Cassidy is staring at me with this morose look on her face, and she says, “You’ve got to be kidding, Chris,” and it’s not that she’s had her feelings hurt or that she’s feeling embarrassed that she’s been refused. “Heidi?” she asks. She stares at me with puppy-dog eyes, big and blue, pouting, saying my wife’s name as if it is low-grade.

It isn’t that Cassidy can’t believe she’s been turned down.

It’s that she can’t believe she’s been turned down for Heidi.

I miss Heidi and her goodness, her virtue. I miss that she cares for homeless cats, and illiterate men, and children in countries whose names I can’t say. Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan and Bahrain.

I can’t stand to stay there, in that room, with Cassidy. My pulse beats loudly in my ear. My hands are clammy, my balance off, as I thrust my feet into a pair of loafers waiting by the door, Cassidy’s voice in the background calling me by name, laughing, saying Don’t go, leaving me dizzy. Vertigo. I lay a hand on the wall to steady myself as Cassidy continues to incant my name, to reveal herself to me as if it might just change my mind.

WILLOW

What I tell Ms. Flores is that Joseph brought me meals twice a day, and twice a day he removed them from my room. I tell her that he wouldn’t let me out, even to pee. From time to time he’d come to empty a jar he had given me (though the smell of my own pee never went with it), and that every night he came to call, unlocking and thrusting open that bedroom door and telling me to undress.

I tell her that every night, after he’d gone to bed, I checked that door to make sure it was locked.

I tell her that I sat there, day in and day out, praying that one day he might forget to lock the door.

I tell her that Matthew never came around, that I didn’t see him again after that day he limped out the front door.

I tell her that I didn’t see Isaac, though I heard his voice, echoing throughout the home, and knew that he was there, moving in and out of a world I could no longer see.

I tell her that I watched out the bedroom window as the snow melted away, leaving gaping puddles along the sidewalks and in the potholed street.

I tell her that once a day I was allowed to leave the room, only to defecate. I tell her how Joseph stood in the doorway and watched me go. I tell her how once I didn’t make it to the toilet in time, and how Joseph made me sit in it for days, until my rear end was covered in a rash meant only for babies. I tell her how he laughed, how I heard Joseph and Isaac talking later about how I shit my pants.

I tell her how one night, by the grace of God, after Joseph paid me a visit, he slipped out the bedroom door and forgot to lock it as he left. I sat on the bed, waiting for the awful sound of the metallic key jingling in the lock, but there was none. Just the whine of floorboards as he moved through the home, the heavy sound of him climbing into his bed, the fuss of the mattress springs when he laid his immense body upon it. I waited for an hour at least, just to make sure, before I stood from the bed and wandered across the cold room, before I inched a shaking hand onto that bronze lever and opened the door.

I tell Ms. Flores how I found the knife in a kitchen drawer, the biggest one from a twelve-piece cutlery set, a chef’s knife, at least eight inches long or more. I tell her how I stood there in that darkened kitchen, watching the faint glow of the moon in the distance and thinking, though there was no need to think because I’d already decided. The house was quiet, but for the hiss of the furnace and the movement of water through pipes.

But of course, I don’t know one way or another because that night, before Matthew arrived, I didn’t step one foot out of my room.

I tell her how I tiptoed into the bedroom and how I watched Joseph sleep. How I watched his fiendish body upon the big bed, how I heard him snore. Ms. Flores is scribbling maniacally across her paper now, making sure she gets the details just right. The way Joseph’s eyes flew open as I approached the bed, the squeaky floorboards awakening him from sleep. How he sat upright in bed, the look in his eyes not scared but confused. How he mumbled, “How did you...” before I jammed that chef’s knife into his chest. How did you get out of your room? was what he was gonna say. But I didn’t give him a chance. That’s what I tell her. His eyes, his mouth, gaped open and his hands felt blindly for the knife before I tore it out and thrust it in again. And again. Six times they said. That’s what they told me when they found me.

But of course, how would I know because that night, I didn’t step foot in Joseph and Miriam’s room.

What I knew, but what I didn’t tell Ms. Flores, was that someone older than eighteen would be tried as an adult. But not someone who was sixteen, someone like me who’d never been in trouble with the law. I wouldn’t get in as much trouble as Matthew would if they knew, if they knew the truth. I knew that ’cause Daddy had told me, back when I was just a kid and we were watching some story on the news. Some story about a sixteen-year-old who murdered her folks. Daddy said kids sometimes got away with it, while adults went to jail, plain and simple. If they didn’t get executed. I remember that I’d asked Daddy: What’s executed? But he never did say though I figured it out nonetheless.

“And Miriam?” asks Ms. Flores.

“What about Miriam?”

“Tell me what happened to Miriam.”

“She didn’t wake up,” I say. Not that I know one way or the other since I wasn’t there, in that room. I claim that she lay there, sound asleep, while I thrust that chef’s knife in and out of Joseph’s chest.

But Ms. Flores is bound and determined. She sets her pen on the table and double-checks the tape recorder to make sure it’s still working. She’s got to get this on tape. My confession. “Then why did you kill her, too?” she asks and my spit catches in my throat and I choke.

Miriam? I almost ask aloud.

But then I hear Matthew’s voice in my mind and slowly, even slower than molasses in January, it sinks in.

If I was ever a vegetable like my mom, I’d want someone to just shoot me. To take me out of my misery.

And that’s just what he did.

HEIDI

In the early afternoon when Ruby is asleep, I walk through the condo collecting items of clothing thrown at random here and there: Ruby’s jumpsuits stuffed helter-skelter in the cushions of the sofa, discarded socks of Zoe’s left beside the front door. I drop them into a heaping laundry basket, make my way into Chris’s and my bedroom and retrieve an overused bra slung over the door handle. I lift his suitcase from the floor, the one we exchanged at the Asian grill on Michigan Avenue, and begin to sort through its contents: button-down oxfords, work pants stuffed into a ball in the corner of the bag. I lift the pants from the bag, checking the pockets for pens and pen caps, handfuls of coins, the type of random things that typically materialize from Chris’s pockets while in the wash. Bottle caps and binder clips, an entire package of travel tissues that disintegrate into a million pieces, and—

My hand lands on something I recognize almost instantly, even before pulling the shiny blue package from the pocket, the words her pleasure socking me in the gut. I double over before the bed, dropping the laundry basket to the floor. Some kind of gravelly sound emerges from me, a gritty, desperate gasp for air. I press a hand—two hands—to my mouth to silence the squall that wells up inside me, a sudden, violent storm brewing deep inside my bowels.