Page 78 of Serial Killer Games

“You’re not like that, though,” Dodi says.

“Like what?”

Dodi places one arm on the back of the sofa, her fingertips coming to rest six inches from my shoulder. “You don’t care about shiny, expensive things. You don’t like tall buildings and fast cars, or world travel and penthouse apartments.”

I don’t. I don’t likeanyof that shit.

“What do you like?” she asks quietly.

I like you,I could say like a paste-eating child.

Apart from that, I have no idea what I like. There was a while there when I was younger when I was trying to figure that all out, before I realized it didn’t really matter in the long run, because there would be no long run. She doesn’t press me. She looks at me like I’m mysterious and fascinating. I’ve done and said such ridiculous things to get her to look at me like that, and here she is, giving me that look for slouching on her sofa after a day of playing homemaker. I wonder…I wonder if this evening wasreal lifeenough for her. What she thinks about me being a part of her real life. She takes a sip of wine and I do too.

“You have two hundred thousand dollars and a terminal illness. Some people would buy themselves a sports car and start driving across the country, or throw a massive party in the most expensive hotel room they can book, or hop on a plane and see the world. But here you are—in my crappy little apartment that smells like stale apple juice and dirty socks—cooking meals and folding throw blankets.”

Maybe not mysterious and fascinating after all. I’m the boring temp who blends into the walls at work. But Dodimelts across the sofa cushions toward me, and the hair on the back of my neck does its thing again.

“I’ve figured out what your MO would be,” she says, her voice lower now that she’s so close to me. She props her elbow on the back of the sofa near my shoulder and leans her face into her hand, and the line from under her ear to the curve of her bare shoulder where her shirt has fallen to the side is one long, sinuous stroke.

“Yeah?”

“You would be known as ‘The Caretaker.’ I’m imagining a job interview mix-up: you’re hired by the mob to ‘take care’ of some people, so you do just that—you break into their houses one by one andtake care of them. You clean, fold laundry, and feed them up.” As she says all this she’s not smiling, but she’s notnotsmiling. I’m meant to crack first.

“How would I kill them?”

She sighs loftily. “Haven’t figured that part out yet. All I know is by the time they get to the dinner table with the good china laid out, they realize they’re goners. They know something terrible is waiting for them.”

“Cleanliness, nutrition, and evening leisure time.”

She glances around the room self-consciously, any prospect of a smile gone. I’ve insulted her. She’s like a porcupine, always curling up tight around her tender underbelly at the first sign of a threat.

Backtrack, backtrack, backtrack…

“But you always have to do it all yourself,” I say. “You don’t get any help.”

She considers my attempt to rectify. “This is not the way I pictured it, you know,” she says.

“The way you pictured what?”

“My life.”

“How did you picture it?”

Against all odds, she uncurls for me. “There was supposed to be a house near a good school. We were going to have a dog—something fluffy and stupid. There was supposed to be a pair of grandparents helping out.Igrew up with my grandparents in the house with us. Cat was supposed to have a dad. I was supposed to have a husband.”

One for six. We sit in silence for a minute.

“What happened?”

“You know that old saying—‘When you off your husband, you find out who your friends are.’ ” She scratches the stem of her glass with her thumbnail. “We had a down payment for a house saved, but I ended up living on that for a few years after Cat was born. No life insurance, of course. Neil had lots to say about the house odds of life insurance. And I wouldn’t have been able to cash in, anyway.”

“You didn’t do time,” I conclude.

She considers me. “You didn’t look it up?”

I haven’t searched online. It felt like cheating. I like her the way she is, a hazy question mark, revealing herself to me in shocking flashes. The way she looks at me right now tells me I did right.

“The laws around medically assisted suicide were changing even as the DA was forming his case,” she says in a low voice, eyes on her glass. “And the prosecution of a young widow—apregnantyoung widow, as it turns out—was poised to become…how do I put it? A full-blown media circus and emphatically not a good look. I’m lucky. The media coverage died down almost before it began.”

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