each of them randomly, but never on successive days. One night she hit a store that she hadn’t been to in a week, yet as she walked in the cashier said, “You’re in luck, we just have one twelve-pack left.” Lucy was mortified.

She didn’t face this trouble at the all-night grocery store, where everyone was weirder than she was. She was a misfit among misfits, none of whom got judged poorly by the self-scanning checkout computer.

She kept pushing the cart down the aisle and replacing items: Kleenex, laundry detergent, fresh tomatoes. She thought fleetingly that stores should hire people with OCD to do nothing more than wander around. Their natural inclinations would force them to clean and straighten everything.

By the time she was done, her beer craving was at full tilt. She couldn’t drink too much tonight, though, because she had agreed to meet Andrea at Starbucks at 10:00 A.M. They would formulate a plan and then go over to the apartment complex. At most, she would have two beers.

Lucy twisted the top off beer number five as she cleaned her kitchen sink, using a scrub brush to get under its rim to the ancient caulk underneath.

Lucy loved the little house she rented on Alto Street, with its mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe by the front door and the old-timey feel of the neighborhood. Her tiny casita was old itself, with a clawfoot tub and a kiva fireplace. One of the few things she hated about her house was the lack of a washing machine. Whenever she wanted to do her laundry, she had to go to a Laundromat about a mile away. It was an inconvenient process for someone who didn’t tolerate inconvenience well.

At the moment, she had no clean underwear left and had worn the same socks the last three days. Her thought was to wash a few of her dainty things in the kitchen sink—but that would require that it be clean. She wiped the surface a few more times before she went to her room to figure out what she would wash.

She picked a few single socks that didn’t match off the floor, and then some underwear. She also was half looking for Nathan’s keys; his car was still in her driveway. She had come home from the grocery store expecting it to be long gone. Of course, she had expected Nathan to be long gone by that morning, and look how that had turned out. So he must have just pocketed the extra fifteen dollars she gave him for a cab back to her place. Classy.

After a few minutes of searching, and once again not finding his keys, she took her unmentionables out to the kitchen and threw them in the sink. She really didn’t want to wash them. She grabbed her beer off the counter and took a swig. She looked at her dishwasher, considering.

As far as she knew, the dishwasher followed the same basic cleaning laws as a washing machine. She would just have to replace the dishwasher soap with laundry detergent and she’d be in business. She put her socks in the dishwasher’s bowl rack and draped her underwear over the silverware tray. After a few squirts of laundry detergent, she turned it on and then took her beer into the living room.

She sat down in front of the TV and watched some old Simpsons episodes, but her mind was elsewhere.

She thought back to the budget meeting and how she was shut down. Why was it so hard for them to understand that what they were doing was wrong? She realized she was anxious, feeling the humiliation that she hadn’t allowed herself to acknowledge during the meeting. She took another sip of beer to calm her nerves. Her co-workers had not only ignored her, they had mocked her for being some kind of police groupie because Gil simply stopped by to say hi. She cursed them all a few more times in her head. Maybe if she had explained to them about her friendship with Gil. Although “friendship” was too strong a word for it. Gil was more of her confessor. He knew why she punished herself. She took another sip of beer. If she had told him about her note in Zozobra, he would have understood that what she needed to be released from was her guilt. Guilt for causing someone else’s death.

Lucy picked up her cell phone and went through her contacts list to find a number, one she