There was one more thing and I have not mentioned it until now, deliberately, because I wanted you to have the whole shape before you had to judge me on it.
When I photographed the notebook — and I did photograph it, every page, on the Sunday night before the police came on the Wednesday, at the kitchen table, two hundred and forty-one entries, because I was twenty-six and I did not trust that anything I handed over would ever be looked at again — I also photographed the inside back cover.
There is writing on the inside back cover. It is not an entry. It is three lines, in pencil rather than pen, and it is the only thing in that notebook that is not about him.
I gave the police the notebook. They have those three lines; they photographed everything too, and Alvarez has never mentioned them to me, which either means they are nothing or means they are something she isn’t discussing with a witness.
But I had them too. On my phone. And then on a laptop, and then, when I got sensible, on one flash drive in a drawer and nowhere else.
I am not going to tell you what the three lines say.
I will tell you what kind of thing they are, because otherwise this is unreadable: they are a name that is not Karen, a place that is not Rhode Island, and a number that is probably a date.
Here is what those eleven days were actually like, because I think anyone would do what I did and I think most people would take longer.
The case for giving them to Ruth.
Ruth Solomon is seventy-one. Her husband died in 2021, so she did the years from 2019 to 2021 with him and everything since alone. She calls me on Sundays. She has a photograph of Karen at nine, on a beach, in a frame on the hall table, and she touches it on her way past without noticing that she does it.
She has asked me, directly, four times, whether I have anything else.
I have lied to her four times.
That is the thing I actually have to live with out of all of this. Not the mail. Not the forum post. I have sat in that woman’s kitchen and eaten her food and lied to her face about the only object in the world that might tell her whether her daughter is alive.
The case against.
Everything in that anonymous message. Her mother is being watched.
If it’s true — and I cannot know it’s true — then Ruth Solomon is the single most dangerous person in the world to tell. Not because she’d tell him. Because she would do exactly what I did. She would look. A seventy-one-year-old woman with a name and a town and five years of grief would get in her car, and there is no universe in which she would be careful, and there is no universe in which she would not be followed.
And if I’m wrong about all of it — if Karen Solomon died in September 2019 — then those three lines are nothing at all. A note about a friend’s birthday. And I would have handed a grieving woman a fresh reason to hope, for nothing, at seventy-one.
Both branches end with Ruth worse off. I turned it over for eleven days and I could not find the branch where telling her helps, and I have never found it since.
So I did the following, and I did it on a Tuesday in October, and I did it carefully because I had learned by then that being careful is the entire job.
I did not delete the photographs. That was my first instinct and it is wrong, because they are potentially evidence in an open investigation and destroying evidence is not a thing you get to do because you have had a hard year.
The police have the notebook. They have had it since the Wednesday. Whatever is on that inside cover, the state of Rhode Island has had it for as long as anyone has, and nothing I do changes that.
What I had was a copy. A private copy, in my possession, that gave one twenty-six-year-old woman with a spreadsheet habit and a demonstrated inability to leave things alone the ability to go looking any night she couldn’t sleep.
And I knew — with total clarity, at three in the morning, which is when you know things — that I was going to. Not that week. But in a year, or in three, on some bad night, I was going to type that name into something.
So I got rid of my ability to.
I put the flash drive in a metal bowl on the fire escape and I burned it, which does not work as well as films suggest and took two goes and smelled appalling. I deleted the laptop copies and emptied the trash and then, because I am who I am, I looked up how to overwrite free space and did that too.
And I wrote down, on paper, one sentence about what I had done and why, and dated it, and put it in my desk, so that if it ever mattered I could say honestly what I destroyed and when, and so that I could not later tell myself a nicer version.
The paper’s still there. It’s the only piece of this I still have.