“No, Sarah,” Genevieve said softly. “It was you, remember? I would never do something like that.” Her eyes darkened with pity and concern.

“This isn’t funny,” I said, my voice low and stiff. But I knew this wasn’t some mean-spirited joke on her part. Her tone communicated nothing but compassion. It said that her heart was breaking for her friend and partner.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but someday, everyone’s going to know what you did.”

A siren went off beyond the horizon, piercing and almost electronic in its pitch, relentless in its one-note anxiety.

“What’s that noise?” Genevieve said.

I opened one eye to see the glowing digits of my clock radio, the source of the electronic wail, then raised my hand and squelched the alarm. It was late afternoon in Minneapolis; I’d been sleeping before my shift. Through the windows of my bedroom, the elms of Northeast Minneapolis cast greenish shadows on the warped wooden floor; they were in the early leaf of spring. It was early May; that much was true.

Also true: Genevieve was in Europe, and my husband, Shiloh, a cop once recruited by the FBI, was in prison. All this is because of what happened last year in Blue Earth. You might have read about it, if you follow the news, but you didn’t read all of it.

At the root of everything that had happened in Blue Earth was a man named Royce Stewart, who’d raped and murdered Genevieve’s daughter, Kamareia, and gotten off on a technicality. Months later, Shiloh had gone to Blue Earth, intending to run down Stewart in a stolen truck. But Shiloh had found himself incapable of murder. It was Genevieve who, in a chance encounter, had stabbed Stewart in the neck and burned down the tiny shack he’d lived in.

It was Shiloh who’d gone to prison, though, for stealing the truck, while Genevieve, her crime unwitnessed by anyone but me, had gone to Europe to start a new life. I didn’t blame her for that. My husband was already behind bars; I didn’t want my old friend there, too.