“What are you thinking about?” I ask her.

She takes a drag of her cigarette. “This. All of this, I guess.”

We’re sitting in the abandoned Tres Bien. Middle table. I’m waiting for another suited man to bust in and lead us on the much worse repeat since last time. She doesn’t care. And I’m too tired to try and stop her from getting shot.

“Do you want to know how I did it? Kudo?” she asks.

“No.” I say. “Not really. I just want to know why. Why all this, Viola?”

“I had trouble remembering. Moreso than I thought. I… I didn’t even realize they’d faked it to that extent. When you said it wasn’t poisoning… it’s like… my doubts all these years were at this floodgate, gathering, being managed. And… poof. It just flooded everything. The whole little house in my mind just came crashing down. And I didn’t know what to think anymore. I still don’t.”

“I see.”

“Do you know? Do you know what happened back then?”

I lean back in my chair. “I have a pretty good idea, yeah.”

“Would you tell me?” she asks, not without desperation in her voice. “So all of this is… worthwhile? To an extent?”

I cross my legs. “The murder itself wasn’t too complicated. It had steps, but it wasn’t too complicated. The first step was to get to Tres Bien a little before Glen Elg showed up, like he usually does. You’d probably spied on him before hand, gotten to know his routine. You probably came here a bunch of times while trying to plan things out in disguises, to make sure Armstrong or anyone else didn’t recognize you. You went to his usual spot and put,” I point to the sugar bowl with a bug in it, “a sedative in the sugar bowl. Not outright poison. You knew the waitress would be suspected if you did that. And you didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. I don’t think, at least. The sedative was a tool, not the end in itself.”

“Hrm. Alright. What did I do next?”

“When it came time for Elg to show up, and you were pretty confident the chances of someone else sitting down were low, you got up and went to the bathroom. You gave him enough time to go in, sit at his usual spot, and put his order in. You left the bathroom, pretending to be annoyed your spot was taken, and sat at the only remaining spot – in the front.”

“What if someone else had taken the front spot in the meantime?”

“No big deal. Elg passes out, but you still have a chance to walk away like nothing’s happened. No skin off your back. New plan, same plan – either way, you’d have had a chance to try again.”

“Okay.”

“Either way, the front table was clear. From the entrance to the back, it was you, Kudo and Elg. Then, you waited for him to order his coffee, put the sugar in, and drink it. A few moments later, he’s passed out. And that’s when you struck, before anyone had a chance to notice.”

I point up. “This mirror was key. It let you see the exact moment and position. And you threw it.”

“Threw it?” she asks, but I think she’d figured it out before we even sat down. Her memories must’ve started firing off the last time we were here. Is this just another game? Or a way to get herself to believe her own memories, for a change?

“I don’t know exactly what it was. I think it was a spiked ball of some kind. You threw it at an angle, up towards the ceiling. It hit right above the middle booth – causing that little chip right there, see it? – bounced off it, and went in the direction of the last booth. It hit the wall at an angle, tearing the wallpaper, and bounced downwards, straight for the neck of Elg, who had likely been slouching against the table once the sedative took him out. With the blade jammed in him, all that remained was pulling the weapon out. If you’d attached a string to it beforehand, it wouldn’t have been a problem. You pulled the string, the spiked ball got detached, flew across the middle booth, and straight into your hands. You then wiped the weapon and hid it. There would’ve been blood on your hands, but as long as you went to try and put pressure on his neck, it would’ve been explainable.” I tilt my head. “Thinking about it, you pulling the ball out is probably what nudged the body to fall to the side of the table, raising the alarm.”

“And the weapon? I hid it? I think the police would’ve found it.”

I smirk. Yeah, she definitely knows everything now. “That was the easiest part. Earlier, when we were here, I threw you my flashlight, and you couldn’t catch it, even though we were barely apart. That’s because you have trouble with depth perception, right? The easiest way to explain that is if you’re missing an eye.” I lean forward. “You’re missing an eye. Yet, I see two. That’s what the weapon was. The spiked ball probably had some means of covering up the spikes. Like, ah – like a blowfish. Once it was nice and round, you could put it back in your eye socket. And nobody would be any the wiser. Right?”

She pulls the eye out of her socket. It looks like a normal eye. Until she squeezes it a bit, forcing it to contract, making the spikes reveal themselves. “Grandfather gave me this. It was the only gift he’d ever really given me. I was, I suppose, his blowfish.”