She stood there for three full minutes. She counted them by the dripping of her kitchen tap, a slow, indifferent rhythm that had no interest in her panic.
The scarf was still on the counter, she hadn't touched it again. Hadn't wrapped it up or hidden it or thrown it out the window the way some frantic, guilty part of her brain was quietly suggesting. She just stood and looked at it, the way you look at something you don't yet have the language to explain.
It means nothing, she told herself. It means absolutely nothing.
But her muddy shoes were by the door. And she had no memory of the night.
She turned on the tap and washed her hands slowly, watching the faint pink swirl disappear down the drain. Then she dried them on a kitchen towel, folded the towel neatly, and set it down. She was aware, distantly, that she was being very calm. That the calm itself was strange. That a woman who had nothing to fear would not be this careful about the way she folded a towel.
She put the scarf in the back of her wardrobe, beneath a stack of winter jumpers she hadn't worn since moving to Velmoor. She told herself it was not hiding,it was tidying.
She had just put the kettle back on because what else do you do, what else is there ,when the knock came.
Three beats.Measured, Official.
Cora closed her eyes for exactly one second. Then she walked to the door and opened it.
Two officers,a man and a woman. The man was broad and unhurried looking, with the kind of face that had stopped being surprised by things a long time ago. The woman was younger, a notepad already open in her hand, pen poised like she had been ready for this conversation before Cora had even woken up.
"Ms. Cora?" the man said.
"Yes."
"I'm Officer Draven. This is Officer Melle. We're speaking to everyone in the building this morning." He paused, just long enough to feel intentional. "Your neighbor, Daniel Voss,do you know him?"
Cora leaned against the doorframe, the way a relaxed person would. "Barely , We've said hello a few times. In the corridor."
"When did you last see him?"
The question landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water. She felt the ripple move outward ,slow, unstoppable.
When did she last see him?
There was dinner. A glass of wine, maybe two,the television murmuring, and then the gap. The dark, seamless gap where hours had been swallowed whole.
"A few days ago, I think," she said. "In the corridor, like I said. He was checking his post."
Officer Melle wrote something down without looking up.
"Were you home last night?" Officer Draven asked.
"Yes," Cora said. The word came out clean and certain, the way a lie does when your body has already decided to tell it before your mind has caught up.
Draven nodded slowly, the way people do when they are filing something away rather than accepting it.
"If you think of anything , anything at all ,please don't hesitate." He held out a card,white, a Velmoor Police Department crest in the corner. A number printed beneath it in small, unforgiving type.
Cora took it. "What happened to him?"
The two officers exchanged a look. Brief,almost invisible. But Cora had spent two years being very good at noticing the things people tried not to show.
"We're not able to share details at this stage," Melle said, her voice professionally neutral. "Thank you for your time, Ms. Cora."
They turned and moved to the next door down the hall. Cora watched them for a moment, then stepped back inside and closed her door very quietly.
She stood in her hallway, Officer Draven's card in her hand, and listened to the silence of her flat.
He's dead, she thought. Not a question. Not a fear. A fact she somehow already knew, the way you know things that live below the surface of memory.
Daniel Voss was dead.
And she had just lied to the police.
She looked down at her hands ,clean now, no trace of red and felt the hollow silence return. That old, terrible silence. The one she had promised herself she would never feel again.
It had found her anyway.