Clementine Irwin meets Faye in the caboose of a stationary passenger train parked in Station Accompli four minutes after midnight. She greets her the same way she did the first time—firm handshake, first name followed by last—and immediately tells her that she has done a terrible thing.
“I’ve done a terrible thing,” she says.
“‘Terrible’ is relative,” Faye replies.
“Not in this case.”
Clem has already planned what she was going to say. She says that she has done a terrible thing because they may not have seen each other for fifteen years but she still knows Faye well. She requested to meet tonight, in the caboose of a stationary passenger train parked in Station Accompli, because the crime would have already been committed, and there would no longer be anything Faye could do to prevent it from happening.
There is a painting on the wall on the opposite side of the station that Clem stares at the whole time she is reintroducing herself. The painting is of an enormous eye, a blue sky with clouds where the iris should have been. It almost looks like a window, except Clem knows it is four minutes past midnight and therefore the sky is not blue but black.
“So you’ve finally developed a moral compass,” Faye says.
“I guess I have.”
The train station is closed, the trains locked up for the night. Both Clem and Faye have broken their way in. The night watchman is making his rounds, but Clem knows his schedule well and she knows Faye does too. There are currently five eyes in Station Accompli and they all watch Clementine Irwin with a lazy sort of judgment, the kind that says, “Yes, you may have done something terrible, but who am I to say so?”
It’s an accurate verdict, more or less. There’s no point in trying to get a painting to understand nuance. All the complexity of the thing she has done has been washed out and to be honest, she doesn’t really care.
Faye asks if she has anything more to say.
Clem says not really. At another time, she might have said yes, she might have said I missed you or I loved you or even I’m sorry, but tonight she is too tired and the painted eye is still staring at her from the opposite side of the station, telling her she is morally reprehensible but sort of justified and a wicked person but also probably okay.
She tells Faye not to read the next day’s newspaper.
“We might have been unlucky.”
“You said ‘we,’” Faye says. “So you were working with someone.”
Someone else. So that’s what Faye is worried about. Clem doesn’t have the heart to lie to her.
“There were a lot of people involved,” she answers quietly, “each doing their own little part. I don’t know all of them.”
“Which part did you do?”
It would be so easy to tell the truth. The truth is that two people died during an unmemorable performance of a Shakespeare play and Clementine Irwin was an accessory to their murders. She will never get caught and probably no one will even care because nobody really cares about these things until they’re caught in them.
The truth is that Faye will care. Faye is the one person in the world whom Clem cannot bear telling. She also cannot bear keeping secrets from her.
“Just don’t read the news,” she says. “Not even on your phone.”
“I never read the news.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“It’s too easy to believe.”
“But I’m not lying to you,” Clem says. “Believe me, Faye. I really did do a terrible thing.”
“‘Terrible’ is relative.”
Clem pinches her sleeve behind her back and twists it around her fingers. She can feel the ghosts there where her skin touches skin, a phantom film of blood in the uncomfortable spaces between her fingers, and she no longer wonders why the lady in the play went mad.
Faye doesn’t hide her hands behind her back, because she has nothing to hide. She tells Clem that this will be the last time they speak, most likely ever, so they’d better both make these last words count. Clem thinks that Faye is probably right.
She will never get caught and probably no one will care. She wasn’t even the murderer. All she did was take a pin from her hair and pass it along. Saying this aloud would likely absolve her of some guilt, although not all, in Faye’s opinion. She stays quiet.
The painted eye withholds comment.
Eventually, Faye gets up, says goodbye, and leaves the same illegal way she came. Clementine Irwin remains in Station Accompli, kept company by three eyes—two in her head and one on the wall. They all point inward.