All Day and a Night by Alafair Burke

her “housewarming” present.
    Remembering the sweetness of the gesture, she felt the tension of the day begin to slip away. She thought of the promise she’d made herself when she had accepted Max’s invitation to live together. This time she wouldn’t just be a roommate. She would try to become the kind of woman who might be able to build a life with another person.
    She set her nearly empty bottle on the coffee table and picked up a hammer. “Tell me where to make some holes, boss.”
    But as she steadied a nail at the center of a tiny “x” Max had marked on the wall, she silently wished that he had been this methodical about his plan for the Anthony Amaro investigation.

CHAPTER
SEVEN
    B y the time Carrie got home, she was infused with three and a half margaritas. Not a regular drinker, her first instinct was to pass out in bed. But as she kicked off her heels inside the front door, she couldn’t ignore the mess piled in the corner: her briefcase, two overstuffed plastic bags, and the philodendron—the leftovers of her surprisingly abrupt goodbye to Russ Waterston.
    She felt restless. Wired. Unfocused.
    Fortunately, she had her own approach to therapy.
    Carrie remembered receiving her first journal, a gift from Mrs. Jenson. Because Mrs. Jenson doubled as a guidance counselor and English teacher, most of the students didn’t take her seriously in the classroom. She was good about referring kids to the free lunch program and asking if they were getting enough sleep, but she didn’t instill the kind of fear most of the kids at Bailey Middle School needed to persuade them to do their homework—or to show up for class, for that matter.
    The first twenty minutes of Mrs. Jenson’s class on Mondays were reserved for “journaling,” as she called it. Her only rule was that their pens had to keep moving on the page. No thesis sentences or five-paragraph formulas required. Just free-flowing thoughts. If students wanted those thoughts to remain private, they could fold the pages in half within the notebook, and she promised not to read those. Most of the kids treated the enterprise as a joke, filling the pages with fart jokes and hallway gossip, and then dog-earing them to test Mrs. Jenson’s word. But for Carrie, those twenty minutes a week were the only peace she ever seemed to find—away from her mother’s expectations, the taunts from other kids, her studies. Away from everything.
    One Monday, Mrs. Jenson asked Carrie to stay after class. She heard a high pitched “oooooh” from a boy in the back row. Next to him, a girl added, “Good girl’s in trouuuu-bull.” It didn’t take much goodness to be a good girl at Bailey Middle.
    Mrs. Jenson waited until the room had cleared to relieve Carrie’s fears with a reassuring smile. “Everything’s fine. I just wanted to give you something.” She unlocked her top desk drawer and removed a journal the size of a hardbound library book. Carrie ran her fingertips across the cherry-red, faux-crocodile cover. She gently opened the snap closure to discover the first blank page, marked with a thin black velvet ribbon. She imagined expensive chocolate. “In case you ever want to write when it’s not a Monday in class,” Mrs. Jenson explained.
    The teacher must have seen Carrie’s reluctance. “Take it,” she said. “Someone did the same for me when I was about your age. My journal didn’t just make me a better writer. It probably saved my life.”
    Now Carrie was thirty-five years old, and “journaling” remained a constant habit. She even bent a page in half on occasion, just to remember how special it felt at fourteen years old to put a secret into undeniable words—to see it in black ink on white paper—without having to share it with anyone else.
    She reached into her briefcase, removed the most recent journal, and wrote down everything she hadn’t said to Bill:
                    It wasn’t the fact they were watching me that made me so