Nora Sheehan sits in a jail cell in Lodgepole, Colorado, surrounded by three cinderblock walls and the kind of steel bars she’s only seen on television, gray and cold. She’s thirteen, the woman she might become still a shadow even though she’s ready to discard her childhood. A longing for her stuffed penguin—a gift on her fourth birthday from her older brother Nico—grips her with an intensity she doesn’t understand, and she twists her thin arms around her shoulders, a featherless bird warming herself with naked wings. She doesn’t look like the sort of girl who just shot her brother.

The two cops in the adjoining room, arguing about what to do next, don’t stop to think about whether or not Nora is cold. Lodgepole, a three-hour drive from the nearest small city, is not equipped to handle a murder or a murderer, and not equipped for a thirteen-year-old criminal of any kind. The older cop is thinking of his fourteen-year-old daughter, sleeping at home under a polka-dotted comforter, and her upcoming quinceañera, when she thinks she’ll become a woman. The younger cop is thinking of how quickly the life drained out of the three holes in the dead boy, how quickly a human body pales without its blood. Both wring their hands, at times squeezing so hard their fingertips blanch. This kind of thing doesn’t happen in their town. It only happens on the news. It can’t be real.

Angie Sheehan is at home, in the purple house on Pine Street with chipped paint, staring at the crime-scene tape covering the door to her son’s room. The same tape covers the door to her daughter’s room. Nico’s bed lies empty, and she wishes she could sink into the faint imprint his body made on the mattress, smell the sweetly masculine body spray he convinced her to buy to mask his burgeoning teenage odor. Angie shivers, not from shock or terror but because when her husband David left to find a lawyer, he left the front door cracked, and a cold draft winds through the house. I should go close that door, she thinks. We can’t afford a higher heating bill, not now. She’s alone with the noises of an empty home, noises that will rattle around the rest of her life. She closes her eyes against the crime-scene tape, the cold, and the leaden dawn leaking through the window at the end of the hallway.