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“I think I can convince her to share her toys for a few hours.” He shrugs and disappears into the hallway to negotiate.

The room goes quiet behind him.

I look back at the box. Somewhere inside is a piece of Casey’s life I haven’t seen before, preserved on tape for nearly two decades. A small part of me wonders how ready I really am for this.

It takes nearly ten minutes before I hear footsteps on the stairs, followed by Baryn muttering something that sounds suspiciously like extortion. It seems Marj is both fully operational before sunrise and unwilling to surrender her obsolete electronics without terms.

The door creaks open and Baryn thumps back in, lugging a squat, grey plastic cube—one of those countertop TV-VCR combos with a screen the size of a dinner plate and a tape slot that looks like a hungry mouth.

He sets it on the desk with a heavy, hollow thud.

"I had to promise to help her reorganize her pantry and listen to her theory on why Marlena was possessed by the devil in 1994," he pants, wiping a fresh smudge of dust onto his jeans. "I’m pretty sure I’m legally her grandson now."

"A small price to pay for forensic progress," I say, already reaching for the first tape.

17

MOTIVE, MEANS, OPPORTUNITY

BARYN

Icall for a break when Serena rewinds the same six seconds for the fourth time and starts squinting at the television like she can intimidate it into producing additional evidence.

I’m beginning to recognize the difference between Serena looking for something and Serena needing to make absolutely certain there isn’t something there to find. The distinction is subtle. An extra pass. Then another. The little crease that appears between her eyebrows when whatever answer she has isn’t quite enough yet.

The television sits frozen on another washed-out frame while she rubs at her eyes and writes another line in her notebook, looking like she'd rather watch another twelve hours of shaky camcorder footage than admit she needed ten minutes away from it. I understand the feeling better than I want to.

My laptop is open in front of me, mostly for show and because I need something to do with my hands. I haven’t touched the keyboard since Serena walked across the room, dropped her battered spiral-bound notebook on my bed, and pulled on the hoodie I left draped over the chair.

She writes in block letters, all caps, every character a perfect match for the ones before and after. I can’t help but watch.

I tell myself it's because I'm waiting for her to finish her thought process and fill me in.

In reality, I'm memorizing the shape of her profile in the backlit gloom. I’ve spent three years celibate enough to blame most of my reaction to Serena on simple biological deprivation. It was a solid theory. Reassuring, even.

That explanation worked considerably better before I started wanting things from her that have absolutely nothing to do with getting laid.

“You know,” she says conversationally, flipping a page in her notes, “the average healthy adult thinks about sexual intercourse approximately nineteen times per day.”

I try very hard not to react. “That sounds fabricated.”

Why is she telling me this?

I know exactly why.

We just spent hours watching footage of her dead best friend, and Serena doesn’t know what to do with feelings she can’t quantify. So she’s found something she can. A number. A statistic. A completely unnecessary fact tossed out just to get her out of her own head.

Fine. We’re talking about sex statistics. I can handle this.

She tucks an errant tendril of hair behind her ear. “It was in the Journal of Sex Research, volume fifty-seven, issue one. Published 2020, peer-reviewed. The sample population was men and women ages 25–40. Nineteen is the reported mean; the standard deviation was seven point eight, but they observed a significant rightward skew in self-reporting, likely due to social desirability bias. It’s almost certainly undercounted.”

She says this without inflection, as if she’s talking about epiphyseal fusion or the tensile strength of femoral bone.

She finally looks up from her notebook, glances at me from across the room. “How often do you think about it?”

She’s sitting cross-legged in the sweatshirt she stole, sleeves pushed to her elbows, half of her hair twisted up with a pencil. The position leaves most of her tattoos exposed, scattered pieces of a skeleton winding along her forearms between vines and flowers. A radius here. The delicate bones of a hand there. Bits of anatomy half-hidden beneath leaves and petals like someone dismantled a body and let a garden grow through the remains.

I’ve seen them before.