By this time he's dropped to the floor, body skewed over the coffee table. The card she'd handed off pressed to its surface. He's not writing, that's clear—the strokes too varied, his wrist too loose. Relentlessly focused, but the quality of his attention somehow different. He'd kept glancing to the TV like he's coming up for air.

He isn't doing that anymore.

He's half-frozen, hand clenched around the pen. Rigidly upright. She looks happy, is his first thought. Her hair needs brushing, the second. The treacherous present tense. He doesn't look away, not any more than he does from the dozens, hundreds of other dead girls filling files filling boxes.

“Huh.” It leaves him almost without a sound. A long shapeless breath. He sits back. Hearing a stranger's lilting voice in his head, feeling Maggie's gaze on him. Like a kind of synesthetic bruising. “She ain't even born,” he says, finding Maggie's eyes. Surprised to hear a quaver in his voice.