Detective Ryling—ex-detective as she was quick to point out—knocked on the front door though she didn't need an invitation. She had her own key I'd given her the second month we'd been meeting.

When I heard the knock, I threw the door open without hesitation. Somehow I knew it was her. Maybe it was the way she knocked. In reps of three, fast, like she had somewhere to be and she had to make this trip quick.

She was standing there in a long dark trench coat. She wasn't in the usual clothes I was used to seeing her in. She was wearing pajamas and sneakers. Her hair was up in a messy bun, she wore no makeup, and her ears were bare of the silver studs she wore everyday.

The coat was a staple. It was a gift from her mother who had—after her own father died—married her more than well off boss in her late fifties. Ryling—who was in her early forties—didn't actually like the coat, but she wore it because she felt bad something so expensive would go unused.

"Hi."

I tried to think of something else to say, but the words weren't coming to me.

"Hi," she said a little more breathlessly than my greeting. Her cheeks were flushed and I wondered if it was because of the cold or if it was because of the stairs.

She looked passed me and cleared her throat.

"Oh." I moved away from the door, making enough room for her to get by me.

As she walked in, I couldn't help thinking about how nothing had changed in the years since we saw each other. I was still living in the same apartment with my grandmother, she was still trying to help me get over my problems, and we were both trying to pretend that we were doing better than we actually were.

She was doing a lot better at pretending. But I could tell she was trying to find herself. Though she had many years on me, we were both in the same in that aspect. She told me a lot about herself in the times that we met up. She though of me as a harmless kid. She trusted me, so I guess that made me trust her a whole lot more than I did anyone else.

She confided in me in how she didn't feel like she had a purpose in life. I understood that. I didn't believe I had a purpose. While she felt it, I knew it. And I think that helped her a lot to know someone was worse off than her.

I never told her that. She'd hate herself more than she already did.

But that was okay. Her ignorant bliss was something I was jealous of, but glad she had.

She walked in and looked at the dreary living room. That hadn't changed much either. The same couch, the same TV, the same dirty rug that needed a good cleaning that included a hefty beating. It was all the same.

"Uh..." I quickly shut the door.

This didn't feel like all the other times. Not when there were bagged up bloody clothes in my bedroom and she was looking at me with so sad eyes. Like she could see how much I was crumbling on the inside.

I locked the door by habit and for some reason I worried about her thinking I was going to do something to her. Which was stupid and irrational. She would never think that. She might think meeting up was unhealthy, but she wasn't scared of me.

She wouldn't have come if she thought that.

Though I explained that to myself, I couldn't help, but watch her body language as I gestured for her to sit on the couch. I walked carefully to not make a sound.

She looked around, setting her small bag on the coffee table.

"Where's Saya?"

I stared at the small bag as I sat in the chair pulled to the side. We were close now, but not too close. Reasonably distant from one another.

"Do you usually carry around a purse?" I couldn't recall if she'd ever brought one around when we met up.

She sagged, letting out a sigh. "Yeah. I mean no. It's new. Daniel bought it for me."

Daniel. That was his name. I would promise I would remember that next time, but I knew that I wouldn't. Besides, there probably wasn't going to be a next time by all the signals she was sending me.

This was a one time thing. Because I begged for her help.

I swallowed the lump forming in my throat and wrung my fingers. My palms were seating. My fingers were twitching and I tried to settle them down, but they were becoming more agitated the more I focused on them.

"Are you going to tell me what's going on? Why you had me come out here in the middle of the night?"

I swallowed the smart-ass remark about it not being the middle of the night and instead of it being early hours of the morning. She wouldn't be happy about that.

"I-I..." I stuttered over my words. They fumbled out from my mouth and they didn't make any kind of sense.

I groaned, rubbing my hand over my face.

"He talked to Ma."

There was a pause.

"Who?"

I scoffed. "Who do you think? Who would I drag you out of bed for?"

Another beat of silence. This one much longer than the first.

"How do you know? What happened?"

There was a hint of worry in her voice, but it was overshadowed by the obvious doubt. She thought I was crazy. She didn't believe me.

I pulled the letter out of my pocket. It was zipped up plastic bag.

I handed it to her. "I thought about keeping it in there a few hours after Ma gave it to me. I don't know if you can get anything from it."

Fingerprints were the last of my worries. Not after what I saw tonight.

But I couldn't tell her that. She definitely wouldn't believe me then.

She took it with a delicate hand. She was a lot more careful with it than I expected her to be. She held it like it was a rare artifact. And maybe it was. She'd been working on this case longer than I'd been involved in it. Though the trail went cold with Izzy's death, the destruction it had caused had never left either of us. I'm sure the parents of the other girls felt the same way.

She held it away from herself. She gazed down at it, blankly, and I couldn't read the expression on her face. There was something missing. Something that I didn't get about what I was seeing in front of me.

The way she looked...

Her eyes were sad. Her shoulders sank.

"Ian..." She turned to me. "Anybody could have done this."

I stared at her for a hard few seconds. "But it could be him. It is him."

I stood up.

Her eyes widened. "What are you—"

Before she could get another word out, I was walking to my room. This was all wrong. This wasn't how I wanted this to go, but I knew she was going to doubt me. After hearing her trying to say that I was too attached, that I had a hard time not glueing myself to people, I knew that it was going to be difficult to make her believe.

But she couldn't say that it was impossible. She couldn't do that to me when I was trying my hardest to keep myself together.

The time that it took me to walk to my bedroom was enough time for her to leave. She could walk right out that door, call me crazy, and bury everything in the past. She didn't have to keep coming back. She didn't think it was healthy by what she told me. She was just doing this because she felt obligated to.

That was okay. I felt the same way. Though there should be more compassion on my part, I was fighting the nature of my very self everyday to care. I felt myself slipping away, becoming this cold feeling thing that would soon become a different kind of monster than the one that hunted all those girls.

As I grabbed the plastic bag of bloody clothes, I felt a sharp stab in my chest. For a second, I couldn't breathe. I was sucking in air, but it wasn't enough. My stomach twisted and I felt like I was going to puke, but then it was gone. I was back to normal. If being me was even considered normal.

I shook my head, furrowing my brows. The pain was nothing. It was annoying.

A panic attack maybe. Nothing to worry about.

But panic attacks weren't something I was used to. Anxiety stalked me, but I was passed the point of caring about anything to be a victim of it.

I clenched the bag of clothes.

The blood was dried, damp inside the confines of the plastic, but it wasn't running like it had before. I slowly walked out to the living room. She was watching me. Her eyes widened as they dropped to the bloody bag.

She dropped the letter onto the ground.

"What have you done?"

I ignored her question as I stood over the couch. I was careful to not move. The blood was safely wrapped, but it wouldn't take much to rip the plastic and stain the carpet or the couch.

"He killed someone tonight. She looked just like them. He's back."

My voice quivered. It sunk down into a deep tremor that would have been missed if it wasn't deadly quiet.

Slowly, she stood up. She stepped around the letter on the floor. She was staring at the bag. I thought she wouldn't ever look away from it, but she did.

But when she turned those frightened eyes to me, I felt that sharp pain again.

Fear. That's the only thing I could equate it to. We were both afraid.

She afraid of me—of what I could be.

And I was afraid of the monster she thought I was.

And maybe the monster that I could be.

She turned her head. It almost like she was shaking her head, but then lost the will to follow through with it. We stood there, her staring at the bag, and me watching her for a few minutes. Ma turned over in her bed, calling out for dad, and then she was back to sleep.

"I have to call this in," she said, her voice stoic.

My hand lowered. The bag was heavy. It felt like I was holding a brick.

"Okay."

I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to go in and tell what had happened. I'd already been in that place too many times.

"Okay," she answered, but it didn't feel like she was talking to me.

When I truly looked into her eyes, I saw that she was worried. There was fear mixed in and that's when I knew that maybe she'd been right about us.

We shouldn't have met up.

We shouldn't have ever met up in the first place years ago.

But like most things, it was too late.

***

When I walked out of the police station—after spending two hours giving a detailed report and filling out paperwork—I let out the heaviest of sighs. It wasn't big enough to take the weight off of my shoulders. There was still a heaviness that was deep inside of my chest. It was weighing me down, cutting off my air, and while I was used to it, it seemed harder to deal with.

Ma was at home, hopefully still sleeping. Detective Ryling had offered to stay there and keep an eye on her. She'd been too nice, offering up her free time, and her sleeping time on a Saturday morning. She had to be egging to get back home.

She'd called it in. I couldn't. I had a difficult time telling her what happened. I didn't think I could do much good trying to decipher my thoughts on the phone. When the officer interviewed me for a statement, that had been easier to get through. I could answer direct questions, but when I had to tell the entire story from the beginning, it was like every word I needed to convey what I wanted disappeared. It was like I unlearned the entire language.

It was over now though. I could relax. Somewhat.

As I walked back home, turning down the ride the officer had offered me—he'd remembered me from when Izzy went missing—I thought about the man from the attack.

I wasn't trying to think about it. If I was being honest, I would have been happier if the whole thing hadn't happened. Well, that wasn't a bad thing to say. I didn't want that girl to die. I didn't want her to suffer like she did. But without her murder, the note would have meant nothing. Her death had opened a new avenue for the police to investigate.

And he was sloppy this time. He'd left a mess after being scared by me. All the other times had been calculated, thought out for days before hand, but it seemed like he was distraught. I would even go as far and say that he was desperate to get the killing out of his system.

The door was locked when I got there. I knocked and waited. Ryling answered the door. She looked like she just woke up, but by how fast she got to the door I knew that she wasn't. Besides, Ryling was too much of a hard-ass detective—even though she was retired—to be lounging after what happened.

"I got to go," she said.

I was still standing in the doorway. "Okay."

Neither of us moved for a moment.

"Thank you for coming out here. I didn't—"

I didn't know what to do, was what I wanted to say, but I decided it didn't matter.

Either she knew what I meant or she was pretending she did. She gave me that same look she had when she first came here tonight. It was a look of pity. Almost. Like she was exhausted and she didn't want to do this anymore. I wondered if she wished she'd never met me. If she wished that she hadn't been nice to be all those years ago. It didn't seem that long, yet, at the same time, it felt like a decade.

She looked down and then out to the hallway. The long moment of silence that fell between us was suffocating. I couldn't break it. I couldn't force her to go. And I didn't want to. I wanted her to stay here only because I didn't like being alone right now.

Not ever.

"I'll see you later," I said. It might have been the worst thing I could have said.

"Sure," she replied, quieter than the silence. It was a soft uttering that was almost swept away by the harsh wind pounding onto the living room window.

There wasn't going to be a later. We weren't going to see each other again for a long time.

Maybe she would invite me to her funeral.

Or maybe she would be at mine when the murderer finally caught up to me.

Or perhaps I would die earlier than that. Life was hanging on a thin string for me. There was no telling how and when I would go, but I felt like I didn't have much left in me to keep going. Not that I was thinking about killing myself. I didn't have it in me. I had people to protect before I could let myself get that far to the edge.

She stepped out into the hallway. The light in the hall was a dim yellow tinted light that made it look like she was at the center of a horror movie. It felt like she was. It felt like I was on the outside looking in, a mere bystander watching a car crash with no ability to do anything.

I balled my hands into tight fists. My legs got this jittery feeling in them like I needed to run the energy right out of them. But I was trapped in this small apartment with Ma. I was stuck in this city that would never let me run free.

Ryling walked away. She didn't say goodbye and she didn't turn back to look at me. This wasn't a movie. This wasn't some crime movie where the good people got their revenge or the bad people got the justice they deserved. This was real life where shitty things happened and bad people got away with the most horrible things.

When I could no longer see Ryling, I shut the door.

A draft of cold air hit me. I stood there, my hand pressed on the door, holding it still as if someone was going to fly through and get me. My other hand was still clutched at my side. It was anchoring me. Because if I wasn't clutching my fingers so tightly to my palm, I think I would have punched my fist right through the wall.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. It was the longest ten seconds of my life. The longest count of my life, but when I got to ten, something small released inside of me. It wasn't enough to lift the anxiety squeezing my heart, but it was enough to let me step away from the door.

I locked the door and went to my room.

As I walked down the hall, I heard faint sniffles coming from Ma's room. I didn't stop. I didn't linger.

Instead, I closed my door and went to sleep.