“Can’t we stop her?” I asked, though I knew the answer. This had already happened. Hearing no response and expecting none to come, I posed a second question, a question tinged with bitterness. “Why do people have guns? Don’t they know?”

“Her father thought he was protecting the family. And he thought it was safe.”

“Then why did he tell her the combination?”

Messenger shook his head. “He didn’t. She guessed it. Her birthday, month, day, year. This is not the first time that Samantha has taken the gun out to look at it, to think about it, to consider . . .”

Samantha counted out three shells. Three cylinders, like miniature fireplugs in shape, each no bigger than a little finger. Samantha stared at the shells and frowned. The number troubled her. The number was not right, not her number.

Her number was seven. She counted out seven shells, lined them up with excruciating care, servant even now to her obsessive-compulsive illness. Seven in a row.

She counted them by tapping each slug with the tip of her finger.

Then she counted them again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again.

Seven times she counted until her demon could be satisfied. Seven times seven.

She popped the clip out with practiced ease and loaded the bullets in one by one. Each one made a multipart click. When she was done, she slid the clip back into the handle of the pistol and piled the gun and her mementos into a crumpled brown paper bag. She walked away, shoulders slumped, tread heavy.

“I can’t watch this again. We don’t need to watch this again,” I said.

“No,” Messenger agreed.

Less than ten minutes later Samantha would fire a single round into her brain and die within seconds.

“Her mother . . . ,” I said, overcome with a wave of pity, guessing that she would play those last few minutes with her daughter over and over and over again in memory and in dreams. She would blame herself. She was blameless, but that would not stop her blaming herself and then her husband.

A question occurred to me, one that Messenger might even answer. “If she had tried to kill herself and survived . . . would she have been visited by the Messenger of Fear?”

“Should she have been?” he asked me.

I thought about it for a while, standing in that gloomy garage. I don’t know why, but it felt necessary to me, to think through what Samantha was about to do, what she had in fact already done.

“Yes,” I said at last. “She has no right.”

“She is a girl with a crippling mental problem who has been bullied,” Messenger said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “And Kayla deserves to be punished. A long and terrible punishment, because her bullying pushed Samantha to the point where she couldn’t endure it anymore. But . . .”

“But?”

“But there has never been, and there never will be, a reason to take your own life.”

“Because?” He was genuinely curious, I think. He was watching me as I answered, something he rarely did.

“Because mostly people live, I don’t know, eighty years, whatever the number is. She’s sixteen. She’s lived a fifth of her life, eighty percent still to come. That’s too early to declare defeat and surrender. People despair and yet go on, and many of them, maybe even most, have wonderful lives. College. Career. Love. Children, maybe, grandchildren, and giving up when you’re sixteen?” I shook my head. “It’s a sin. It’s an awful, wicked, ugly sin.”

There was a long silence between us. Then, through the floors and walls we heard a muffled Bang!

The silence stretched.

“A sin,” I said, tears filling my eyes. “But I guess she’s paid all she can pay for her sin.”

“And Kayla?”

I brushed away the tears, even as I heard her mother’s voice, worried, cry, “Sam? Sam?”

“I want to be away before she screams,” I said, barely able to force the words through gritted teeth. “I don’t want to hear her mother scream.”

The garage dissolved into the school. It was morning, before the bell. The car line snaked down the street and through the parking lot. Kids jumped out of cars and vans and SUVs, reached in to grab backpacks, then rushed away to join friends or just head to the first class.

Inside, the arriving crowd was compressed into the main hallway of my school.

I stopped moving then. My school?

I looked to the left and saw a poster. The colors had changed since Messenger and I had visited before. Now they were green and white. There was a well-drawn caricature of a pirate with a cutlass clenched in his teeth. Sir Francis Drake High School, home of the Drake Pirates. Go green.

“This isn’t the . . . This is . . .”

Messenger said nothing, but I had the sense that he was standing just a bit closer to me than was his habit.

I felt for tendrils of memory. It was like trying to grab wisps of smoke. They were there, I could almost touch them, but when I tried, they slipped away, leaving only bits and pieces, impressions. They left a residue of emotion but without explanation.

And yet I knew this place. This school.

My God, had I known Samantha Early? Was I one of the many who must have known that she was in pain, must have known that she was being bullied?

The ground seemed to be moving beneath me, like a slow-motion earthquake. I felt nauseous, and as if that was only the merest symptom of a terrible illness that was coming my way, inexorable, impossible to sidestep.

“Where’s Kayla?” I demanded. “That’s what you’ve come to show me, isn’t it? That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? So where is she?”