I consider putting on some eyeliner to strengthen my gaze in case I have to stare somebody down inside. I don’t really need it. Men often tell me I’m beautiful, but men will tell any woman that. My face is actually masculine in structure, a vertical series of V’s, simple and to the point. The V of my chin slants up into a strong jaw. My mouth, too, curves upward. Then comes the angular bottom of my nose; my prominent, upward-slanting cheekbones; my tilted brown eyes and sloping eyebrows; and finally the dark widow’s peak of my hairline. I see my father in all of this, twenty years dead now but alive in every angle of my face. I keep a picture of him in my wallet. Luke Ferry, 1969. Smiling in his army uniform, somewhere in Vietnam. I don’t like the uniform-not after what the war did to him-but I like his eyes in the picture. Still compassionate, still human. It’s how I like to remember him. A little girl’s idea of a father. He once told me that I almost got his face, but at the last minute an angel swooped down and put enough softness in mine to make me pretty.

Sean sees the hardness in my face. He’s told me I look like a predator myself, a hawk or an eagle. Tonight I’m glad for that hardness. Because as I get out of the Audi and shoulder my cases and tripod, something tells me that maybe Sean is right to be worried about my nerves. I’m going in naked tonight, without benefit of anesthesia. And without the familiar chemical barrier that shields me from the sharp edges of reality, I feel more vulnerable to whatever it was that panicked me last time.

Walking down the dusky street lined with wrought-iron fences and second-floor galleries, I sense a human gaze on my skin. I stop and turn but see no one. Only a dog lifting its leg beside a lamppost. I scan the galleries overhead, but the heat has driven their owners inside. Christ. I feel as if I’ve been waiting all my thirty-one years to see the corpse in the house ahead of me. Or maybe it’s been waiting for me. Something is waiting for me, that’s for sure.