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Marina had always believed that she was a good person who wouldn’t hurt anyone else. Sure, she might imagine it sometimes, but who didn’t?

As an adolescent she’d been chubby and that made her a target for other students at her all-girls school. They whispered mean things about her behind her back and looked pointedly at what she chose for lunch. “Greedy Marina” they called her. She had teen acne, too, which didn’t help.

Once the meanest girl, who was also the school’s Head Girl, smuggled a slice of pepperoni pizza out of the cafeteria and put it on Marina’s chair. Of course Marina sat down on it by mistake, ruining the skirt of her uniform and giving rise to the new nickname, “Greasy Marina.”

It was that sort of school, but her parents believed that children needed to grow up resilient.

Sometimes she fantasized about punching these thin, beautiful, perfect-looking girls in the nose. She thought about knocking them to the ground and force-feeding them the squashed pizza. She doodled the scenes, badly, in her notebooks, using up red marker after red marker for blood, scribbling so hard that she tore holes in the pages. But she would never actually attack anyone. Desperately boring Sunday school lessons had taught her to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and she kept following that rule, even though it seemed no one else ever did.

The only person she told was Nana Sylvia. “The best revenge is violence,” her grandmother told her. “But that’s illegal, so the second-best revenge is living well.”

She taught Marina that her love of food was a superpower and encouraged her to learn to cook gourmet meals and study and practice to be a chef. And Marina found discipline, confidence, and acceptance in kitchens. In a kitchen, if you did your job well people respected you. All without the need to punch anyone.

But now she had pushed her boyfriend down the stairs. On purpose.

Her first instinct, strangely, wasn’t to scream and be horrified at what she had done. It was to pause at the top of the stairs, head tilted, and listen for any noise coming from her children’s bedrooms. There was nothing, which was a relief.

But also: there was nothing coming from the cellar either. No moans, no shouts.

“Shit,” Marina said.

She peered down the cellar stairs. The only light was from the flashlight, which seemed to be lying on the floor. She saw Xavier’s hand still beside it.

“Are you okay?” she called down. No answer.

She didn’t have another flashlight, so she went to the living room, where there was a gilt candelabra on top of the piano. It took another five minutes to remember that she’d put the matches on a high shelf in the library, out of reach of little hands.

Candles lit and flickering gothically from the draft from the cellar, Marina crept down the stairs. The shadows seemed to dart and writhe around her.

“Xavier?” she said, when she was near the bottom. She held out the candelabra and squinted into the darkness. Xavier was lying on the flagstones, sprawled out on his back. His eyes were closed and there was a splash of bright red on his forehead.

“I’ve killed him,” murmured Marina to herself. She should be terrified at this, but possibly because of the shock, she mostly felt curious. She reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped onto something squishy that popped under her foot.

Immediately she recoiled, picturing snails, snakes, Xavier’s eyeball—but the scent of vinegar reached her nostrils and she realized she’d stepped on a pickle.

She picked up the flashlight, put the candelabra on the floor, and squatted beside Xavier’s body. Her hand under his nose confirmed that he was still breathing. She put her fingertips on the side of the neck to check for a pulse: it was strong.

He wasn’t dead.

Her breath hitched in her throat and suddenly, she was crying.

She didn’t want to kill Xavier. She didn’t want to kill anybody, not really. She had brought three lives into the world, and she knew how fragile life was, because every time her children left her side she was anxious that they were going to die. Lucy Rose’s birth had been difficult—the baby had been transverse and Marina had labored for twenty-four hours, and when Lucy Rose came out she was blue and floppy. Marina had never felt such terror, until the nurses and doctors cleared Lucy Rose’s airways and she turned a normal color and started shouting.

Xavier was someone’s child. Someone loved him. He might be a con man, he might be an utter shit...but he did not deserve to die.

Marina wiped her eyes and her nose. She had to pull herself together. Crying wasn’t doing any good. So she hadn’t killed him, but now she had to deal with him.

She checked his head. The blood seemed to be coming from a cut on his forehead—when she looked more closely she saw the glint of a shard of glass in it. Gingerly, she felt around the rest of his skull under his hair, and found a large bump on the back of his head. He must have hit it on a stair on the way down? How could she tell if he had a skull fracture? If he’d broken his neck?

She should call 911. But then...what would Xavier tell them when he woke up?

Marina stood. The first thing was to get some light. It was too dark down here.

A little fumbling and some sotto-voce swearing later, and she’d replaced the fuse that she’d removed from the cellar box and was cleaning Xavier’s head wound with the first aid kit she kept in the bathroom. The cut had bled quite a bit, but it was small and shallow—she remembered what head wounds were like, from the time that Archie had fallen off the swing set. She made sure it was clear of glass, and then cleaned and disinfected it and put on some Band-Aids.

Then she gazed around, considering her next steps.

She couldn’t carry Xavier upstairs, and if she left him down here and waited for him to wake up, he would remember her pushing him. That would probably make him angry. Angry enough to hurt her? Maybe. She didn’t know him that well, and he was a liar and a thief at the very least. What was certain was that she couldn’t defend herself: he was much bigger than she was, and they were in a cellar. No one would be able to hear her scream...except maybe her children.

And then maybe he would hurt them .

Suddenly her next step seemed blindingly obvious. And she had better do it fast.