There was something satisfying about the click of the keys and the ding when she completed a line. She knew that if anyone got ahold of this letter, there wouldn't be much mystery as to what she was talking about, but she chose to be vague anyway, just for her own piece of mind.

Inspector,

There is no sense tracing this letter, I am not in the city from which it was posted. I am surviving, and so there is no real point to looking back. But I feel I owe it to you. I want you to know that there are no hard feelings for the pain you tried to illicit in me. You were just doing your job after all. Besides, how could I blame you when you were right after all? I know I don't need to explain myself. I'm gone, and I should leave it that way. I'm sure by now you've talked to people around me, seen my medical records, worked out everything. Motive is your job, isn't it? But I still find myself wanting to explain. It keeps me awake at night.

How does an average and arguably timid women become a vindictive, manipulative, criminal? I'm afraid my dear friend could answer that from personal experience. I can't blame her, however.

I'd love to use it as an excuse. Her lies. Her mysterious backstory. Her being my connection to the kind of people who can fake papers and find out things about policemen. I could blame her. After all, she was the one who rushed up the stairs to rescue me. All of my friends did. But she was the one who put herself in my place. She was the one who was being strangled on the roof.

But I was the one who found a bat. And I was the one who used it. Still, even this is an over simplification. I don't deserve the kind of sympathy that comes with a crime of passion. Oh no, I wasn't just an innocent woman who attacked for the first time because I was hot and scared, and my best friend was in danger.

People felt the need to follow us, to save me. To stop him from beating me. From killing me. But he dragged me to the roof in the first place because he suspected I was poisoning him.

He was right.

I had been poisoning him for weeks. I was done. I would stand for this behavior no more. I loved and I lost, but not because of death. I lost all the love in my heart the moment I realized how thoroughly he put his own happiness before mine.

No longer safe in my home, knowing if I left I would leave behind my blood, the fruit of my body, and robbed of the chance to start anew with more. In pain, emotionally and physically, deep in my soul, suffering the loss no woman should have to bare, I spoke to a lawyer who informed me that the only way out of my dangerous and loveless marriage was to wait for death. Wait patiently for death.

My mother would tell you, patience is a virtue I never possessed. But my mother used to tell me something else, Inspector. Better to be alone than in bad company.

You were never bad company, Inspector. Never.

Yours,

Ángeles Del La Muerte

With shaky hands she pulled the paper from the typewriter and stared at it. She put it into a small envelope on which she had typed Burn after reading. She wet the tab and closed it, then placed it inside another envelope with the address of the Madrid police station. Someone would come by to take the letter with them to another city to post it. The question now was would she give it to them? Or would she throw it in the fire herself?