Chapter 1: The First Message

The thing about the text message—and this is the thing you have to understand, the really central point that Terry would later, in the police station's fluorescent aftermath (the kind of lighting that makes everyone look either tubercular or guilty or both), try to explain to Detective Ramirez, who had that look people get when they're pretending to understand something that they manifestly do not understand—was that it came from his own number.

His own number, meaning: the phone in his hand, the iPhone 12 (128GB, Pacific Blue, purchased on installment through Verizon in March of 2021, seventeen months ago and still not paid off), that phone's number was the same number displayed on the screen as the sender. Which is to say that Terry had, according to the phone's admittedly limited ontological framework, just texted himself.

The message read: "She knows what you did in the basement."

Terry was—and this is important—sitting in his car in the Whole Foods parking lot in Brookline, Massachusetts, at approximately 7:43 PM on a Thursday, October 13, 2022, eating a Mediterranean wrap (organic chicken, hummus, cucumber, red onion, the onion pieces of which he'd been meticulously removing because they made his breath smell in a way that Karen had once described as "aggressively biological") and listening to a podcast about the history of the font Helvetica, which: okay, granted, not the most riveting content, but he'd been trying to cultivate interests that made him seem more intellectually curious, or at least like someone who had interests beyond fantasy football and the obsessive monitoring of his credit score.

He had never been in a basement. Not his basement—he lived in a third-floor condo. Not anyone else's basement that he could remember, at least not in any context that would generate the kind of sentence that includes the phrase "what you did."

And but so the thing that happened next—the thing that would later be identified by his therapist, Dr. Mehta (Yale, Stanford residency, a slight accent that Terry could never quite place and had been too embarrassed to ask about), as the exact moment when Terry's previously manageable anxiety disorder metastasized into something requiring pharmaceutical intervention—was that a second message arrived.

"Check your sent messages."

Terry's hands, which had been holding the wrap with the kind of careful tension that suggested the wrap might explode if squeezed too hard, began to shake in that specific way that hands shake when the body's sympathetic nervous system has abruptly shifted into what his Apple Watch would have categorized as "elevated heart rate zone" if he'd been wearing it, which he wasn't, because the band gave him a rash.

He opened his sent messages folder. Scrolled down through the usual detritus—confirmations to Karen about dinner plans, a text to his mother about her knee surgery, something to his friend Mike about the Patriots' offensive line that in retrospect seemed embarrassingly laden with military metaphors for what was, ultimately, a recreational activity performed by millionaires.

Then he saw it.

Sent yesterday, 3:17 AM—a time when Terry had been, verifiably, asleep, or at least in bed, or at least in that liminal space between scrolling Instagram and actual unconsciousness—a message to a number he didn't recognize.

"It's done. The ceiling fan worked perfectly."

Terry sat very still. The podcast was still playing, something about Swiss design principles. A woman walked past his car pushing a shopping cart, her child screaming about organic strawberries.

His phone buzzed again.

"You're going to want to delete that."