Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

asked her to meet him, convinced she’d say no. Or not show. There wasn’t much in it for her. But here she was.
    “So,” Leo said.
    “So.” She tugged her black skirt so it hung farther over her crossed legs.
    “Where did you first meet him?” He wanted to get to the point, but carefully, afraid he might bore her or scare her away.
    “At a party.”
    The black skirt had a pointy, uneven hem, and she wore it with a blue Levi’s jacket and black flip-flops. Her hair was streaked dark and light, and her eyes were outlined in black. Montana Goth, he had come to think of it. It wasn’t real Goth; her lips were glossed pink.
    “What kind of party?” he asked.
    “Just some keg, at a house.”
    “Was it a high school party? Why was he there?”
    “He knew the kids who were having it.”
    He imagined Troy Grayling in a dark room full of teenagers, sipping cheap beer from a plastic cup.
    “How old were you then?” he asked. He felt himself slipping into the rhythms of the courtroom. He did it with Helen, too, caught himself grilling her, after a day watching the trial. He cross-examined waiters when they went to dinner. Helen was back at their hotel now, reading a novel, thinking he had to swim at the university pool.
    “Fifteen, I guess,” she said.
    She was eighteen now, he knew. Troy Grayling, who had killed Leo’s daughter, was twenty-four. The case had taken almost two years to come to trial. The trial took two weeks, and the jury had returned a guilty verdict the day before. Leo and his wife, Helen, had been in the Missoula courtroom every day, and it had been harrowing. Each morning in the gallery, confronted with the blank, mildly surprised look on Troy Grayling’s face, Leo thought about charging the defense table and prying the young man’s eyeballs out of his skull with a ballpoint pen. Or of bringing a knife in Helen’s expensive handbag, which no one ever searched, to draw across Grayling’s throat: the satisfying pop of the trachea, the sudden flow of blood. No conviction could be satisfying like that. He had touched his own throat during the testimony, feeling for the right spot.
    But this girl, Sasha, had been a child when she met Grayling; he tried to remember that.
    “How old were you when you first slept with him?” he asked.
    “Fifteen,” she said.
    “Was he the first?”
    There was a pause. “Yes,” she said. It sounded provisional, and he wondered about her childhood.
    “Did he seem dangerous to you? Back then?”
    She pulled one foot up on the chair, hugging her knee—the skirt was long and loose enough for that—and considered the question while pulling on her darkly polished toes. It was a childish gesture, not a seductive one. “A little bit,” she said. “Not in a bad way.”
    “It was a good kind of danger?”
    “I mean, that’s just how Troy was.”
    Leo blinked, and forced himself to breathe.
    He had spoken to his daughter the night she disappeared. It was late in Manhattan, and would have been dark in the wooded canyon outside Missoula, where Emily was house-sitting. She was studying forestry at the University of Montana and had been telling him about her fieldwork, which she loved, when she stopped abruptly and made a funny noise, then said, “Give Angela my love,” and hung up. Leo hesitated, called back to no answer, and then called the Missoula police. He didn’t know anyone named Angela. It had to be a code: Emily was being told to act natural and get off the phone. He spent some time describing the problem to the dispatcher, and then searching his e-mail inbox for the house address Emily had sent. When the police arrived in the canyon, the house was empty. There was a cut window screen and a full cup of cold tea by the phone, no sign of struggle. They never found the knife, and Leo guessed it was at the bottom of the river that drifted through town. A pair of hikers found Emily’s body in a disused railroad tunnel in the mountains. It had been a bad