enough on my family as it was, I couldn’t even imagine what it would do to my parents if I went to prison for murder. The reason I had been considering it to begin with had never been out of some noble urge to sacrifice myself on the altar of justice, anyway. Partly it had been because of Hugo—only a total shit would have let him spend his last couple of months in jail; but letting a bunch of internet douchebags spin bullshit that he would never see was a completely different thing. And, like my dad had said, Hugo had chosen this. His mind had been eroding, but not to the point where he didn’t know what he was doing. He had done this deliberately, and he had done it to protect me. Throwing that away would have felt like a really impressive level of ingratitude.
The other reason I had been considering turning myself in had been because why not? What was left to protect? Even when most other stuff had gone by the wayside, I had hung on to the idea that at least I was a decent guy, one of the good guys, but the overwhelming likelihood that I was a murderer put a fairly big damper on that. But it was surprising how fast I had got used to the idea. Not that I liked it. I had never had fantasies of being a badass dangerous outlaw; basically, all I had ever wanted to be was normal and happy. But with that off the table, and once the initial shock had worn off, badass outlaw at least felt better than contemptible useless fucked-up victim. In a weird way, it actually went a step or two towards canceling out the victim thing; it made the fact that I had let two scumbag skangers kick my ass a little more palatable. At least somewhere along the way I had, apparently, done some ass-kicking of my own.
All of which was to say that I wasn’t going to be handing myself in to the cops. Rafferty could go fuck himself. I didn’t need a plan; all I needed to do, if by any chance he showed up, was keep my mouth shut.
The big question, the one I hadn’t really thought about up until then, was what I was going to do instead. I couldn’t just drift around the Ivy House for the rest of my life, appealing though that sounded; in fact, there was no reason I should still be there at all. There was my apartment to deal with—I was still paying the mortgage, and my savings weren’t going to last forever—there was work, there were all the things that Hugo had given me an excellent excuse for ignoring. Now Hugo was gone, and there they all were, lined up to jab at me more insistently by the day.
It seemed to me that it came down, in the end, to why I had killed Dominic (if I had, if, sometimes that slipped away from me). I didn’t buy the implausible out that Rafferty had dangled in front of me, the scare gone wrong—if that was all I had had in mind, why not just jump Dominic and throw a few punches, or wave a knife around? Why the baroque hassle of learning how to make a garrote, never mind how to use one? No: that had to have been because I wanted to kill him. And the reason mattered.
I went through it in my head step by step, methodically, pacing back and forth between rooms and talking out loud to myself to make sure I had things straight. If I had done this because Dominic was giving me grief that summer (plausible, given how shitty he had been acting in general) or because of some dumb hormone-fueled bullshit over a girl (who had I even been into, that summer? Jasmine Something but not like I had been madly in love, same for Lara Mulvaney and basically every other remotely attractive girl I knew—I couldn’t believe I would have garroted anyone over any of them, although clearly what I believed meant less than nothing)—if it had been that kind of petty tantrum, then that didn’t seem like something I could just gloss over. Not that I felt the need to do penance by dedicating my life to serving the poor, or anything, but aiming for a pretty white picket fence didn’t seem like an option either. It was the wrong