Her voice was gone by the time a policeman pried her away from Mom. She'd been screaming for a couple of hours before a neighbor finally called them up. And they took another hour to come. By that time, she had lost her voice and the policemen outside could only hear her sob. Another two hours passed before the firemen came and knocked the door down. She had been conscious the whole time. She would never remember any of it, though. But she would always know she was awake and conscious for the whole of it. The pain had burned right through her memory, only leaving a charred hole in it.

She wouldn't remember much of what happened right after either. The police couldn't question her because her voice was gone. Grandma had just been notified and was still on her way. She lived far so it would be half a day before she arrived. One policeman just hung out with her. The other uniforms were probably busy measuring the hole in Mom's head. They might even have thrown a blanket on her shoulders. They might as well have gone home and left her there for all she cared. They were no use. They never found the killer. Even though they went all-in, Grandma had told her. Put their best detectives on the case and all. Not because Mom was such an important person to them. Just because they couldn't figure it out, and it puzzled them. They found the bullet in the wall, in the middle of the blood splatter. They computed the direction from which it had come and found that it intersected the kitchen window. Only the kitchen window wasn't broken, and was locked from inside. So the killer had been in the kitchen, right? So they looked at the floor and found foot prints that weren't from her or her mom. But the door hadn't been forced, there weren't any fingerprints anywhere, nothing had been stolen... They simply had nothing to start from. Her mom wasn't just unimportant to them. She was no one remarkable. Why anyone would go shoot a bullet through her head was a mystery to everyone. They had contacted all her recent former boyfriends and they all had an alibi. None of them could have afforded a hitman, none of them had a motive, and it didn't look like an ex's revenge at all. It looked more like the work of a mafia professional. Which was out of question because the mafia never killed women, right?

She was dead for no reason. And Eeva kept this charred hole in her memory. It still burned. Even ten years after.

She always thought that one day she would find the killer and confront him. But, now, she knew that she simply didn't have it in her. She wasn't even able to stand up to the other girls in school. And that would be if she found him, given that the best cops in town couldn't, even when the evidence was fresh. Two years earlier she had gone into detective-mode, when she was thirteen, but quickly realized that that was it. The murderer had escaped and would stay at large. He would never be caught and punished for destroying her mother's life and her own.

She had the most horrible nightmares. The kind she woke up screaming to. Lately, they had become worse and worse. She had come to dread going to sleep. She'd drink too much coffee, stay up and slack on the web until Grandma came up for the third time. By that time it was two in the morning, and she couldn't keep her eyes open anyway. She'd worm herself into bed and hug the pillow the way she had hugged Mom when they were watching TV together. She would quickly fall asleep and quickly find herself screaming and panting and shaking and wet with sweat. The next day, she'd fall asleep in school. The only place where she wouldn't dream.

She couldn't take it anymore. She had started dreaming of Mom. Dreams that weren't scary at all. Real memories of when Mom was alive. She'd wake up from those and cry and cry and cry until she had no more tears. She had to do something about the dreams. That's how she ended up in Doctor Astikainen's waiting room.

"Eeva Roivas?"

She stood up and walked into the office.