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“I need to move out,” Amanda tells me over the phone. “Blake has become intolerable. I can’t deal with him anymore.”

I got the call from Amanda right after I got out of the D train station in Brooklyn. Apparently, Blake has been terrorizing her since I moved out. He wants her to leave, and she wants to leave. I’m not sure what prompted this. I can imagine that hair in the Chinese food might have pushed him over the edge. He’s squeamish.

I doubt anyone has found the little gift I left in the kitchen yet—I’d know if the fingers had surfaced. And I’m even more doubtful that Blake discovered Stacie’s blood on the floorboards of the living room. I saved the blood after I killed her and spilled it right in the center of the room to make it easy for the police to find, in case they are completely incompetent. I don’t think it will be hard for them to believe Blake killed Stacie though, especially since he won’t be alive to defend himself.

“I understand if you can’t live with him,” I say. “I mean, that’s why I left. I couldn’t take it anymore either.”

“I never thought so before”—Amanda’s voice trembles—“but I’m beginning to worry he could be dangerous.”

I still don’t believe Blake is capable of hurting anyone. He doesn’t have it in him. Take it from a woman who knows.

“What if we talk tomorrow?” I suggest. “I can come over before Blake gets home from work, and we can talk about finding a new place together.” When she hesitates, I add, “I mean, it’s not like you’re going to move out this second, right?”

“I guess,” Amanda says, although she sounds doubtful.

“Listen,” I say. “You scope out some apartment listings. We’ll make plans to check them out.”

The plan seems to placate Amanda. She agrees to meet at the brownstone tomorrow, early evening.

That means I don’t have much time. Whatever is going to happen must happen tomorrow.

So it’s a good thing I’m here in Brooklyn, a block away from Elijah’s apartment. He’s got a few things for me, and he didn’t want to carry them around. One especially.

Elijah lives in a four-story walk-up, and of course he’s on the fourth floor. The street is relatively deserted except for a man lying on the sidewalk, clutching a drink in a brown paper bag. Several storefronts are shut down and boarded up, with the wooden planks covered in obscene graffiti. It’s not exactly prime real estate, like our brownstone on the Upper West Side, and I find myself clutching my purse closer to my chest. With Elijah’s brains, he could be incredibly successful, but he lacks Blake’s ambition, and I get the feeling he’d rather spend his free hours playing video games than climbing the corporate ladder. Plus, his social skills are severely lacking.

I walk up to the intercom and hit the button for apartment 4A. Almost instantly, the buzzer sounds, and I’m able to go inside.

I huff and puff my way up the stairs to the fourth floor. I don’t know how he manages to live here, although I can just imagine Elijah dashing up all those stairs every day. He probably enjoys it.

When I get to apartment 4A, I have to take a second to catch my breath before I ring the doorbell. Again, Elijah answers almost immediately like he’s been waiting just behind the door, and his face lights up at the sight of me standing there red-faced.

“Whitney.” He grins. “Come in.”

I don’t bother to correct him this time. It’s not like anybody important is going to overhear in this hellhole.

I slip inside Elijah’s small apartment and take off my jacket. It’s the first time I’ve ever been here, and I’m surprised by how clean it is. I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly. I had imagined dirty pizza boxes and lots of bottles of Mountain Dew. Maybe he cleaned because he knew I was coming. The furniture is sparse—a sofa, a wide-screen TV, a bookcase constructed from cinder blocks, and a coffee table with a game controller abandoned on it.

As for Elijah, he looks about the same as always. He’s wearing another old T-shirt with a pair of jeans, and even though we’re indoors, he’s wearing his white Linux baseball cap with the penguin on it. I’ve only seen him without it a handful of times, and his thinning sand-colored hair was always plastered to his skull, like a case of chronic hat hair.

“Nice place,” I comment.

He beams at me. “Thanks.”

Okay, enough small talk. “You got everything?”

The smile drops off his face. He usually seems proud to help me with everything I ask him for, but not this time. “I do.”

“Let’s have it then.”

“Whitney.” He looks down at his dirty sneakers. “I’m just not sure about this…”

“I can give you more money if that’s the issue.”

He jerks his head up. “That’s not the issue. At all .”

I frown. “You said you could help me. Are you going to help me or not?”

He lets out a long sigh. “Just a minute.”

I wait in the living room while Elijah disappears into another room. I wait for a good few minutes, too antsy to even look at my phone, and then finally he comes back out carrying a paper sack. I note that it’s the perfect size to hold a couple of apples…or a couple of fingers. Talk about versatility.

Elijah thrusts the paper bag in my direction. “Here.”

I check inside. Sure enough, it’s everything I wanted. A Social Security card and passport for a new identity—something I hope not to need, but you never know what will happen after everything goes down tomorrow. I hadn’t predicted how things would go south with Jordan after all.

And there’s one other thing in the bag. A very small bottle filled with a clear liquid.

“Is this it?” I ask. “The tetrodotoxin?”

I was reading up on toxins, and I decided that tetrodotoxin—the poison in blowfish—was my best bet. I wanted something lethal that wouldn’t work instantly.

“Yes,” he says. “That’s it.”

“Perfect. Thank you.”

Elijah’s eyes look big behind his glasses. “This will kill him, you know.”

“Yes, that’s the point.”

Elijah already knows that I killed Jordan. He also knows about that bitch who stole Jordan from me. Like I said, he knows a little too much.

“Well,” I say with finality. “Thank you for everything.”

His face fills with panic. “Listen, Whitney, you don’t have to do this.”

I drop the bottle of tetrodotoxin back in the paper bag with my new passport and Social Security card. “Yes. I do.”

“You don’t,” he insists. “I mean, yes, Blake is an asshole who cheated on you. But who cares? He’s an idiot. He doesn’t even deserve you. You can just walk away from this.”

Elijah doesn’t know about what I did to Mr. Zimmerly and Stacie Parker. If he knew about that, he wouldn’t be telling me to walk away. He would know it’s far too late.

“I can’t let it go,” I say tightly. “How would you feel if the person you loved was having sex with somebody else?”

He gives me a sad look. “Believe me, I know exactly how that feels.”

It’s no revelation that Elijah loves me. It’s a fact that I have known for a very long time. I have used it to my advantage for many years, but now it’s gone too far. His infatuation with me has become annoying, and it’s starting to interfere with my plans.

“Elijah,” I begin in a patient voice that I have used before with him.

“I know, I know,” he sniffs. “I realize you don’t feel that way about me. But, Whitney, I would be so good to you. I would worship you every day, and I would never, ever cheat on you like he did.”

I wish I could love Elijah. It would be so much easier if I did.

“I would treat you like a queen,” he continues. “I’d wake up every morning thinking how lucky I am just to be with you.”

“Elijah…”

The longing is plain on his face. For a moment, I wonder if he’s still a virgin. It doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. If he is, it is partially my fault. He has been pining over me since we were teenagers. He’s a nice enough guy, but his unrequited love for me has ruined his life. He would have been so much better off if he’d never met me.

“Forget Blake,” he says. “I love you, Whitney. Please let me show you how much.”

And then he leans in to kiss me.

It’s an okay kiss. It’s not like the first kiss that Blake and I shared, which made fireworks go off in my entire body—the kind of kiss that was still lingering on my lips hours later as I fell asleep alone in bed because he was too much of a gentleman to take me to bed that first night. But when we separate, I can tell it was that kind of fireworks kiss for Elijah.

“Wow,” he breathes. And even though it wasn’t an amazing kiss, the look on his face makes up for it.

“Let’s go to the bedroom,” I say.