"You're not thinking this through." Harry warns from his spot over on the couch.

Dexter doesn't look up from the notes he's making on the blue print. "I am. I have thought everything through. The grandparents are in town. Deb and Quinn are out of town. Everyone busy. Nobody looking for Dexter. Alone at last."

"Then why are you planning for two?"

That makes him pause, blink, and now he sees it—the kill he's been working on, the setup, the ambush . . . it's a two person job. A team effort. Only he doesn't have a playmate.

"Fuck." The papers go flying, scattering around his apartment in a tornado of frustration and he fists his hands on the desk.

Harry bats one away with a frown of disappointment. "She's not coming back."

"You think I don't know that?"

"Knowing something and accepting it are two different things."

"Not for me."

His foster father's silence on the subject is deafening.

It's true though. Facts, evidence, these are the building blocks of his world. Things are what they are. The truth may be hidden, may be complex, but once found, he's never been one to question, to live in denial. Even with Rita . . .

He's read up on the process of loss, has gone through message board after message board of internet support groups, looking for guidance on how he's supposed to do this, what it's supposed to look like. In the end he does it wrong anyway, knows the correct action and still inexplicably chooses the wrong ones. (It doesn't occur to him that maybe that's grief). No matter how varied the stories, there's always a common thread of subconscious denial, post after post about that moment just after waking when you forget, when you expect the other person to be there.

That never happens for him, he knows there's no one else to get Harrison if he cries at two a.m., knows when he reaches out in the morning her side of the bed will be cold. (He still does It, though, thinks maybe he owes it to Rita to forget, just once.)

He doesn't understand what's happening to him now.

"She's a loose end. You've never had that before."

"No. You've never let me. Dexter stands alone."

Harry drops his gaze to the mess of papers with a pointed look. "And this is the reason. Connections are messy. Messy gets you caught. She almost got you caught."

"She would have learned." The protest feels weak, ineffectual.

"But she didn't want to."

No, she didn't. And suddenly he's choking with rage. She didn't want him because of his dark passenger, so why doesn't his dark passenger want to do this without her?

"She didn't want us," he whispers.

"It's not her fault." Harry's voice is now sympathetic, consoling, "No one can be expected to live with the reality of what you are. I couldn't."

Dexter grimaces, clenches his hands tighter, "Lumen did. She saw me, and she didn't turn away."

But she did. She did, and he knows it.

So this is what denial feels like . . .

Harry shakes his head. "She was broken. Like you are, like you'll always be. Did you really think you could keep her once she was fixed?"

"You said you thought I could have been different. That maybe you were wrong. That maybe I didn't have to be this."

"But you are. And if you weren't . . ."

"Lumen would be dead."

Lumen would be dead, and Rita would be alive. And he probably wouldn't have dated her, wouldn't have Harrison. He can wish and dream and unravel his life in a million different ways, but none of it makes any difference. He is what he is, and there are other monsters out there waiting to meet him.

And tonight's the night.

He picks the blue-prints back up and begins to plan anew—a clean, precise one person strike that he can already see will be far more elegant.

"It's better this way." He murmurs absently. "Much, much better."

00

It's late July, when the package comes in the mail. There's no return address, but the Miami-Dade postmark tells her all she needs to know.

Her father hands it to her with a look that says he noticed the post-mark, too. Gently shushes her mother when she asks "Aren't you going to open it?"

"She's twenty eight years old, Margaret. Let her have a little privacy."

Lumen gives him a tight half-smile, and tucks it beside her on the couch, letting it rest against her thigh like a secret.

Later that night when all is still and quiet she peels the padded envelope open, tips its contents out on to the bed.

The gleaming pearl handle of her knife is stark against the dark comforter and for moment she just stares at it. Trying to decipher what it means.

No note. No explanation. No careful pink tissue paper wrapping.

Just her knife dropped in a priority mail-envelope like an afterthought.

And maybe it's because he wants her to have something to remember him by.

But she can't help thinking it feels more like he's getting rid of her.

Three days later she breaks a cup at work, cuts her fingertips on the pieces, and for a second she's transfixed by the sight of blood on glass, reaches out to smear a bead of it along the crystal clear surface of the largest piece and watch in morbid fascination as it dries.

"You okay?"

She manages to pocket the fragment as she turns to smile up at her co-worker. "Yeah, I just . . . didn't realize I'd cut myself. Sorry."

That night she lines the jagged piece up on the window sill next to her blood slides and stares at the dark stains in the moonlight. Her blood looks just like the others.

If she'd been a slide, if she'd been a trophy, Dexter would have had to keep her.

00

August comes and the kids return to Orlando for the start of school.

He and Harrison move back into the apartment.

Everything back to normal.

The daily search of Minneapolis Criminal Activity Reports greets him when he gets into work. But this time he pauses before clicking on it. It's been three months and nothing. He's not even sure what he's looking for.

Loose threads.

Messy connections.

Dexter deletes the report without opening it and turns off the automatic search. If he experiences a flicker of something like loss at the action, well it's brief and quickly shed.

He's always been a very neat monster.

00

Lumen's not quite sure what she's doing here. She's passed by this place a dozen times and never noticed it. But now she has, and she can't bring herself to walk away.

The occupants barely look up as she enters the 'Woman's Crisis Center' that looks like its run on nothing more than a shoestring budget and female determination. And she wonders how many times a day someone darkens their doorstep only to leave at the first sign of too much interest or not enough.

Finally after some predetermined interval a small, practically-dressed woman comes over and offers her a cup of tea. "I'm Valerie."

Lumen stares down at the proffered mug and says the first thing that comes to her mind. "I don't need help."

Which somehow, within these walls, roughly translates to 'I need so much help I don't even know where to begin.'

Valerie pulls back the tea and takes a sip as if that had been her intention all along. The silence is stifling, and Lumen wonders how many times this woman has used it to get people to talk.

She should leave now. This place is dangerous. This place is unnecessary. Extraneous. She's not a victim. She's not in crisis.

She's not a victim any more.

She's not.

Valerie keeps looking at her, too patient, too knowing. She's been here for three minutes and has already given too much of herself away. She should go.

"I was hoping to volunteer. I have a job, and I might be going back to school, but I can come by in the mornings or at night. Your website says you run twenty-four hours." They keep looking at her. "I don't sleep much," she adds lamely at the end in an unintended outpouring of honesty.

And she can tell they all know it's not quite the whole truth, but they're willing to give her the lie.

Shoestrings and feminine determination aren't so generous they can afford to turn down the offer of free labor.

Eventually Valerie stops mentioning the group sessions she's leading. Anna stops trying to get her to train as a crisis counselor for the hotlines (She knows she's not qualified to counsel anyone).

Instead Lumen discovers a talent for the tedium of paperwork and finances. It's small and unshowy and nothing that will ever result in the kinds of thank you notes the others get.

But no one notices if you don't have the right emotional reactions to expense reports.

Across the office a red-haired teenager comes in, heroin thin with a fading black eye, a healing split lip and skittishness she knows all too well. Valerie goes over with the tea and Lumen watches as the girl breaks down in a sobbing mess of pain and fear and rage that no amount of group therapy (no amount of blood) is ever going to entirely take away.

She puts in the earbuds of her iPod and goes back to her spreadsheets. Pretends she doesn't know what's happening. Pretends she doesn't constantly think about what she could do to the people who make this place necessary. To the man who did that.

I told you it would change you.

She was already changed.

She was.