52. SKYE

Kuna, Idaho

I just knew Domanska wouldn't find the coffee cup where Brecia remembered.

Who knew if it was still there, anyway? I couldn't imagine him keeping something like that lying around.

While we whispered through the detective's dreams that night, I prepared myself to be disappointed.

My murder would remain unsolved. Lots of murders did. I stayed dead either way, of course. So what did it matter?

But it was harder to lie to yourself without the distractions I'd had while I was alive. No phone. No TV. Just my own thoughts, and the prickles of disappointment that crawled across my body as I stared at the detective—who had fought so hard for Meghan—while she slept.

"She won't find it," I told Meghan and Brecia matter-of-factly.

They didn't correct me. But they didn't stop whispering, either.

I knew she wouldn't find it.

Right up until the moment she did.

* * *

It wasn't tucked into the desk drawer anymore. In fact, it was at the bottom of the recycling bin in the garage, hidden underneath Amazon boxes and food packaging, set to be picked up earlier that week—if he hadn't taken April and the girls and run.

Domanska found it on the Daily Grind security footage—a still frame of James, holding the cup as he walked outside on the morning he'd murdered me—before she found the cup itself.

From the way she lingered on the still frame, zooming in until the little smiley face I'd drawn on the cup, right down to the eyelashes, was visible, I knew she'd listened.

My mom cried when she learned that Detective Andrews, who would be replacing Detective Kittleson on all cases for the foreseeable future, told her that my murder would be added to the charges against the "MatchStrike Killer."

All of us—Brecia, Meghan, and I—were there when he told her. We'd been staying with my mom instead of with April or Domanska.

I hoped the best for April and the girls, but I didn't feel quite the same way about them as Brecia did. I was glad we'd helped her, of course. But I didn't want to see her horror or her tears as she learned the details of what her husband had done.

I didn't blame her for what he'd done; however, I was pretty sure I'd still be alive if she'd looked at her husband just a little bit harder, instead of looking away.

* * *

We visited James, who was being held without bond on three murder charges, in jail.

It was my idea.

I wanted to say a proper goodbye. All of us did.

He looked truly pathetic. His beard had already begun its descent into a nasty bird's nest, and he was wearing a dirty orange jumpsuit that was too short at the ankles.

Confined to a tiny cell with a rangy giant of a man coming down off meth, while awaiting a possible death sentence, he was finally as fearful and powerless as he deserved to be.

We spent a full three days with him.

Each time he fell asleep, we drew close and composed our magnum opus of nightmares.

April, telling the police everything she knew. The steel in her eyes when she told a reporter that the death penalty did not seem excessive.

Women, contacting the news in Idaho and Utah and Colorado to say that they, too, had brushed paths with him.

Elle's eyes flashing as she talked about what he'd done to her and how disgusting he actually was.

Nicole's relieved, mirthless laughter as she shared the texts she'd sent to a friend to get out of her date, leaving him alone in the restaurant with the bill.

Marjorie, selling her side of the story to a tabloid. "My Step-Son the Serial Killer."

His coworkers from Colorado and Utah and Idaho telling the press that he wasn't nearly as smart as he pretended to be at work.

The nightmares had exactly the desired effect.

He awoke screaming and panting after a few minutes every time, babbling about "bitches" and "lies."

He started trying to stay awake, just to avoid the nightmares he knew were waiting for him anytime he drifted off. It made him increasingly touchy, mean, and delirious as the days wore on.

His cellmate, the meth head, didn't appreciate any of this.

On day three, at two in the morning, Meth Head had finally had enough. As James awoke with a pathetic howl, he threw off his bedding on the lower bunk and hauled James off the top bunk in one swift motion.

James hit the floor with a sick thud and scrambled to the corner of the cell, darting his eyes around and trying to orient himself to what was happening. He favored his right arm, which hung at an odd angle.

Meth Head advanced.

James screamed for help.

The lights in the jail stayed off.

As his frantic screams echoed through the cell block, the three of us walked down the hallway and into the moonlight beyond the barbed wire and bars. We didn't look back. He'd taken enough from us in life—and in death, too.

There was no pleasure to be found in whatever happened next. Only justice.

* * *

We stayed with my mom for a week after that, soaking in the sunlight of the little kitchen and the home that, unlike the police station or the cabin, felt like a safe haven.

I didn't linger on goodbyes. And neither Meghan nor Brecia talked about making their way back to Colorado and Utah to see their parents one more time. Knowing there would be reunions with our loved ones in the future made those final farewells feel less dire.

The three of us spent those last moments searching my memories for a link. Looking for someone who would welcome me into the matrix that held my grandparents and great grandparents and everyone who had come before them.

We finally found it in El Salvador. I'd only been there once—when I was just a baby. We'd visited my mom's sister and her two daughters, Rocio and Erica. Both were close to my age—and still very much alive. But on that short trip, we'd met dozens of others, some friends and some relatives. As I replayed the memories from that trip to San Salvador for Brecia and Meghan, I saw introductions to second-cousins and half-brothers and one great aunt.

I felt silly as I called out to the people in my memories as they greeted my mom with big hugs and reached for my rosy cheeks. What was I supposed to say? "Hello, are you dead too?"

The memories stayed the same until my chubby one-year-old self was hoisted into the arms of my great aunt—Marcia.

"Can you hear me?" I asked her softly as I watched my baby hands grab at her graying hair.

As I said the words, I instantly felt the memory change. Meghan and Brecia suddenly faded away, and I knew that Marcia was looking right at me when her eyes opened wide in surprise and she said my name. Not Skye—the anglo-sounding name I'd insisted on when I got to middle school—but my birth name: Estela. Stars in the sky. "Ah, mija, Estelita. ?Cómo puede ser?"

"Go," I heard distantly from the edges of the memory. And for just a moment I lingered in the feeling of being loved from so many different places in time.

I imagined Meghan, finally wrapping herself into the memory of her grandmother like a warm blanket.

I thought of Brecia and her Aunt Nelly.

Then I let myself be folded into the memory, into the arms that were waiting for me.