Lorraine could picture Emily's eyes, intense and engaged, watching every blow to her own chest and abdomen, trying to feel the sound, the swoosh and splat into her flesh, watching her own arms rising then falling away, repulsed. Emily wasn't one to decompensate. Her own murder would not have been lost on her.

Lorraine spooned into the vanilla swirls of the ice cream cake. She examined the bite before she tasted it, the alternating layers of vanilla and shards of chocolate shell, a repackaged childhood treat. She and Emily, little girls on their first outings alone, would walk the four blocks from home to the Campus Dairy Bar, their hands sweating with clutched dimes and quarters, and order a dipped cone to share. Emily would eat all the chocolate off the top, leaving the ice cream to Lorraine.

The spoon was cold against her teeth as the ice cream slid onto her tongue. Lorraine closed her eyes, swallowed, waited for a picture to form, waited for tears, nausea, horror, anything, but Emily's death had, over the years of waiting, begun to make sense to her, become well-worn and ordinary, as if the death had written itself back upon Emily's life, making all other endings impossible to contemplate.

Lorraine sliced into the cake by spoonfuls, enjoying its simple, familiar taste, eating until her forehead burned with cold.