After

What happened next was not ours. We were done. The rest belonged to the people who came after us, and I'm going to tell it the way it was told, plain, because it deserves plain telling, and because the plainness of it is its own kind of awful.

The fire had gone to ash. The door was open. The lamp was burning. The lake went on. Some time in the small hours, a deputy doing a final pass of the reopened lane saw the porch light still on and the door open and went up to check, the way they do, routine, and found the cottage the way the cottage was, and after that the lane was not a lane anymore, it was a scene, and the scene was photographed and measured and the four of us were enumerated and removed, and the world that had gone on without us kept going on without us, making phone calls, calling families, opening files.

Mae's mother. Eli's parents. My parents. Theo's father. They drove up a lane that had been closed for five days to learn the worst thing a phone call can tell you and then drive, and some of them arrived at first light and the porch light was still on and the door was still open and they went in, some of them, because they didn't believe phones, and they came out, and those ones didn't speak for a long time after.

The county went quiet and then loud and then quiet again. The little town store where we'd bought the cereal and the right kind of bread and the cherries became, briefly, famous, the clerk on the news saying he remembered them, the four kids, nice kids, polite, buying cheap wine, and he hadn't asked, and he wished he had, as if asking would have changed a single thing. The bench outside the science wing got flowers. The cottage got tape. The lane got renamed in the local paper as the place where it happened, and it happened to us, and we were not there to object to the naming.

For four days the police had nothing but the scene and the dead man from the first cottage and the four of us and a description of a man in a black ski mask and light blue skinny jeans, which was almost no description at all except that it was a strange enough combination to remember, black mask and blue jeans, the kind of detail a witness, if there had been one, would have given and then apologized for giving, because who remembers the jeans, who remembers the color of the jeans of the man who killed you.

But the jeans were remembered. I don't know by whom. I wasn't there to be asked. Maybe the deputy saw a glimpse. Maybe someone at the far end of the lake heard us and saw a figure cross the lane in the early dark. I'll never know. I know only that the jeans went into the file: black ski mask, light blue skinny jeans, and the county had that, and the file sat with that, and the families waited, and the lake went on.

Then the file moved. I can't tell you how it felt, because I was not feeling anything anymore, but I can tell you what was reported, because that part is a matter of record. On the fourth day after us, the police announced an arrest, and the name in the arrest was a name I knew, a name I'd heard across the quad, a name that had said cottage in the sun, a name that had packed all the bags in one trip, a name that had slept by the motel door, a name whose eyes were blue and pale and patient and wrong.

The name was Theo.