I believed him.

I believed all of them.

The jail sat behind the courthouse in a low gray building that always smelled the same no matter the season: bleach, coffee, wet coats, paper. They did not take me to visitation. They led me instead to an interview room with cinder-block walls and a table bolted to the floor. There was no clock. I noticed that immediately. Rooms that want control never have clocks.

Sadie Quinn was already inside.

She wore an oversized county sweatshirt that swallowed her frame. Her hair had been hacked short and uneven, as if someone had cut it with dull scissors in bad light. She held a Styrofoam cup in both hands but wasn’t drinking from it. Her face looked older than sixteen and younger than it should have at the same time. Like someone had paused her in the wrong year and then released her without warning.

When I stepped through the door, she looked up.

Recognition hit her face first.

Not confusion.

Not fear.

Recognition.

Then came something worse.

Relief.

“You’re real,” she whispered.

My throat tightened so hard I had to swallow twice before I could speak. “You know me?”

Her eyes filled instantly. “He said if I ever got out, I had to find the woman in the sunflower kitchen.”

My kitchen.

Not the kitchen I had now, but the one in the farmhouse Dean and I shared outside town. The yellow curtains. The sunflower wallpaper border I had hated at first and then left up because replacing it felt wasteful. The ridiculous ceramic canister set Dean liked teasing me about, saying it looked like a grandma won it in a church raffle and built an entire room around the prize.

There are moments when your life does not shatter all at once. It slips.

That was the slip.

Because Sadie Quinn could not possibly have known my kitchen unless she had been inside my house.

I sat across from her because my legs no longer trusted the ground.

“Who said that?” I asked.

She stared at the cup. “Dean.”

Hearing his name in that room felt obscene.

It poisoned the air.

I forced myself to ask the next question. “How do you know my husband?”

Her mouth trembled. She looked past me once, toward the deputy by the door, then back down at the cup in her hands.

Very softly, she said, “He told me he wasn’t your husband anymore by the time they burned the body.”

I actually stopped breathing.

The deputy moved, maybe thinking I would faint, but I put a hand out without looking at him. Something in me had gone past panic and into a colder place. A place built entirely out of terrible listening.