Nona Flores stood, days before she died, in front of her dresser in the bedroom she had occupied since childhood. Nona was nearing the end of six months of anguish over her part in Miguel’s conviction, of doubts whether she—Nona Flores—a woman whose character she could respect. She had always believed that she was: brought up Catholic, a volunteer for the homeless, still a virgin despite some boys’ best efforts, the responsible woman of the house for eight years now, for her mother died when she was twelve. But I sent Miguel to death row. With lies. These thoughts would not cease.
    Her testimony, which echoed without embellishment what she had told the police, linked Miguel to the murder weapon—a carving knife—found at the scene of the crime. But she never saw Miguel leave his house in a rage, carrying the knife, and speed off in his car an hour before Sonya Sanchez and Miguel Sanchez, Jr., were allegedly killed—not at the Sanchez residence but at the apartment of Sonya’s sister, where the mother and son were staying temporarily. Still, with no doubt of Miguel’s guilt, she believed her story would aid the path of justice.
    Now, as she stared at her black eyes in her mirror, her malaise was terrible. What have I done? she asked herself, as she had done a thousand times already. She had confessed her lie to her priest, but she would not concede to his council, to go to the police and come clean. She opened one of her dresser drawers, and retrieved from under a pile of folded sweaters a necklace. A present for her eighteenth birthday. A small stone seahorse hung from the necklace; through some of her teenage years Nona was fascinated by seahorses, believing them to be the cutest creatures on God’s great earth. She looked at the little seahorse and said to herself, He’s guilty. He’s guilty, it doesn’t matter what you said in court. He would have been convicted either way. Stop torturing yourself. For weeks she had had horrible dreams of Miguel’s execution—of watching his lethal injection, of imagining his pain has he lay paralyzed. In those dreams she could see his eyes staring back at her until the last light of life flickered.  
    Miguel was a sick, violent man. Of that Nona was sure. She babysat for the Sanchezes a few times during the summer after her high-school graduation. One evening, after Miguel, Jr. went to sleep, Nona decided to check her email on the computer in Miguel’s home office. Miguel never asked her not to do this, but she still felt somewhat intrusive. Various important papers of Miguel’s were scattered around the desk, and Nona took extra care not to move a single one. She checked her email and then, on a whim, opened Miguel’s browsing history. One after another, she found sites with women being tied up, tortured, beaten, debased sexually. One of an older, homely woman being defecated on; another of a blonde girl, naked and hung upside-down as a pair of men whipped her. She looked at three or four sites and suddenly felt very vulnerable; she immediately closed the browser, and with a pounding heart ran out of the office.
    Those images, which she tried earnestly to forget, made her suspicious of Miguel. Perhaps they made her more observant of little things: when the Sanchezes returned later that evening, Nona noticed a certain coldness in Miguel’s demeanor toward Sonya, and some bruises on Sonya’s arms. Certainly not evidence that Miguel practiced any of the violence she saw in the pictures, but she no longer wanted to babysit for him.
    It was months later that she saw actual abuse. Her bedroom window looked down into the Sanchezes’ kitchen, and one evening she saw Miguel strike Sonya—hard, across her face with his forearm, and Sonya, stumbling, crouched behind the kitchen table. The sight upset Nona incredibly and she stood frozen watching Miguel’s animated motion as he scolded his wife, and then stormed out of the house. And another time she overheard his screaming as the family got out of their Ford station wagon in front of their house, when Miguel called Sonya a “stupid ****” right in front of Miguel, Jr.
    Although Nona had told her father of these events, he had said she should mind her own business and leave the situation alone. How upset Nona felt—her mounting seething hatred of Miguel, her silent empathy for poor Sonya. She never saw Miguel strike the boy, but she knew that whatever Miguel, Jr., witnessed would leave longstanding psychological scars.
    Nona still held the seahorse necklace, her eighteenth birthday present. It was a gift from Miguel, and when she learned of his perversions he hid it in her dresser drawer under her sweaters, where she would never have to look at it. But something—and she had no idea what—kept her from getting rid of it altogether. And now that Miguel was sentenced to die, she grew fixated on the necklace. She often stood by the dresser, morosely eyeing the necklace or caressing its stone caring, as if it were a magical amulet through which she could undo her awful damning words.
    Nona took a Percocet to get herself to sleep that night. The next day, she would call Dr. Davis’s office and make an appointment for therapy; within a week she would be dead.

    Another woman, Renée Jones, would not hear about Nona’s murder until the evening after it occurred. Renée, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of one—a “stay-at-home” mom—returned that day from Dallas, where she had been visiting her mother. Bill, Renée’s husband—forty-two, a schoolteacher—and her son met her at the airport. Most of the ride home transpired in silence. Once home, she showered, changed, and made a meal of leftover pasta. That evening she had a book club meeting; she nearly left the house without her copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but Bill caught her in the driveway and handed it to her.
    Her “book club” was Dr. Joplin—formerly, her English professor at UNLV. Physically, Renée had aged little since twenty-one: blonde, petite, she regained her firm figure soon after Jacob was born. The professor wasted no time ushering her into his bedroom, still wallpapered in the dowdy taste of his ex-wife, even though the divorce was ten years ago. In dimmed light he lowered Renée onto his bed and removed her pants, and as he buried his face in her soft shaven vagina she fought back thoughts of how disgusting the whole affair was.
    Driving home, she heard the report of Nona’s death, but her thoughts were not on the radio but on her husband. Lately she felt more and more compelled to tell him everything and bear his anger; she figured he probably already knew, or at least suspected, anyway.
    That night as she drifted to sleep soft organ music rose up around her as she found herself seated on the hard wooden pew of her childhood church, fervidly engrossed in prayer. Her heart ached, and as she prayed with ever increasing concentration she began to quiver and sob. A hand, meant to comfort, touched her right shoulder and startled her from this uneasy state. Beside her was a younger woman in a black dress with flowing black hair. Renée cried harder and collapsed in the younger woman’s embrace.
    “Don’t cry,” whispered Nona Flores. “We’re all capable of evil things. I lied at my neighbor’s murder trial. That woman”—pointing at an older perfumed lady with curly white hair—“has been stealing money from her job for thirty years.” Renée wondered how such a nice looking old lady could do that. Nona continued, “and the man standing at the back of the sanctuary—he’s—“
    Her whisper grew fainter.
    “—a killer.”
    Renée jerked her head around to look behind her. She beheld the man’s deathly face, screamed, and awoke in a cold sweat.