Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Karin Slaughter 2018

Excerpt from The Silent Wife © Karin Slaughter 2020

Will Trent is a trademark of Karin Slaughter Publishing LLC.

Lyrics from:

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” (written by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio)

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Marc Owen/Arcangel Images

Netflix roundel © Netflix 2019. Used with permission.

Karin Slaughter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008150853

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008150846

Version: 2020-08-03

Dedication

For my GPP peeps

Epigraph

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—Too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one’s name—the livelong June—

To an admiring Bog!

—Emily Dickinson

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

August 20, 2018

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

July 26, 1986

Chapter 7

August 21, 2018

Chapter 8

July 31, 1986

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

August 23, 2018

Chapter 11

July 31, 1986

Chapter 12

August 26, 2018

Chapter 13

August 2, 1986

Chapter 14

August 26, 2018

Chapter 15

One Month Later

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Karin Slaughter

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

For years, even while she’d loved him, part of her had hated him in that childish way that you hate something you can’t control. He was headstrong, and stupid, and handsome, which gave him cover for a hell of a lot of the mistakes he continually made—the same mistakes, over and over again, because why try new ones when the old ones worked so well in his favor?

He was charming, too. That was the problem. He would charm her. He would make her furious. Then he would charm her back again so that she did not know if he was the snake or she was the snake and he was the handler.

So he sailed along on his charm, and his fury, and he hurt people, and he found new things that interested him more, and the old things were left broken in his wake.

Then, quite suddenly, his charm had stopped working. A trolley car off the tracks. A train without a conductor. The mistakes could not be forgiven, and eventually, the second same mistake would not be overlooked, and the third same mistake had dire consequences that had ended with a life being taken, a death sentence being passed, then—almost—resulted in the loss of another life, her life.

How could she still love someone who had tried to destroy her?

When she had been with him—and she was decidedly with him during his long fall from grace—they had raged against the system: The group homes. The emergency departments. The loony bin. The mental hospital. The squalor. The staff who neglected their patients. The orderlies who ratcheted tight the straightjackets. The nurses who looked the other way. The doctors who doled out the pills. The urine on the floor. The feces on the walls. The inmates, the fellow prisoners, taunting, wanting, beating, biting.

The spark of rage, not the injustice, was what had excited him the most. The novelty of a new cause. The chance to annihilate. The dangerous game. The threat of violence. The promise of fame. Their names in lights. Their righteous deeds on the tongues of schoolchildren who were taught the lessons of change.

A penny, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a dollar bill …

What she had kept hidden, the one sin that she could never confess to, was that she had ignited that first spark.

She had always believed—vehemently, with great conviction—that the only way to change the world was to destroy it.

August 20, 2018

1

“Andrea,” her mother said. Then, in concession to a request made roughly one thousand times before, “Andy.”

“Mom—”

“Let me speak, darling.” Laura paused. “Please.”

Andy nodded, preparing for a long-awaited lecture. She was officially thirty-one years old today. Her life was stagnating. She had to start making decisions rather than having life make decisions for her.

Laura said, “This is my fault.”

Andy felt her chapped lips peel apart in surprise. “What’s your fault?”

“Your being here. Trapped here.”

Andy held out her arms, indicating the restaurant. “At the Rise-n-Dine?”

Her mother’s eyes traveled the distance from the top of Andy’s head to her hands, which fluttered nervously back to the table. Dirty brown hair thrown into a careless ponytail. Dark circles under her tired eyes. Nails bitten down to the quick. The bones of her wrists like the promontory of a ship. Her skin, normally pale, had taken on the pallor of hot dog water.

The catalog of flaws didn’t even include her work outfit. The navy-blue uniform hung off Andy like a paper sack. The stitched silver badge on her breast pocket was stiff, the Belle Isle palm tree logo surrounded by the words POLICE DISPATCH DIVISION. Like a police officer, but not actually. Like an adult, but not really. Five nights a week, Andy sat in a dark, dank room with four other women answering 911 calls, running license plate and driver’s license checks, and assigning case numbers. Then, around six in the morning, she slinked back to her mother’s house and spent the majority of what should’ve been her waking hours asleep.

Laura said, “I never should have let you come back here.”

Andy pressed together her lips. She stared down at the last bits of yellow eggs on her plate.

“My sweet girl.” Laura reached across the table for her hand, waited for her to look up. “I pulled you away from your life. I was scared, and I was selfish.” Tears rimmed her mother’s eyes. “I shouldn’t have needed you so much. I shouldn’t have asked for so much.”

Andy shook her head. She looked back down at her plate.

“Darling.”

Andy kept shaking her head because the alternative was to speak, and if she spoke, she would have to tell the truth.

Her mother had not asked her to do anything.

Three years ago, Andy had been walking to her shitty Lower East Side fourth-floor walk-up, dreading the thought of another night in the one-bedroom hovel she shared with three other girls, none of whom she particularly liked, all of whom were younger, prettier and more accomplished, when Laura had called.

“Breast cancer,” Laura had said, not whispering or hedging but coming straight out with it in her usual calm way. “Stage three. The surgeon will remove the tumor, then while I’m under, he’ll biopsy the lymph nodes to evaluate—”

Laura had said more, detailing what was to come with a degree of detached, scientific specificity that was lost on Andy, whose language-processing skills had momentarily evaporated. She had heard the word “breast” more than “cancer,” and thought instantly of her mother’s generous bosom. Tucked beneath her modest one-piece swimsuit at the beach. Peeking over the neckline of her Regency dress for Andy’s Netherfield-themed sixteenth birthday party. Strapped under the padded cups and gouging underwires of her LadyComfort Bras as she sat on the couch in her office and worked with her speech therapy patients.

Laura Oliver was not a bombshell, but she had always been what men called very well put together. Or maybe it was women who called it that, probably back in the last century. Laura wasn’t the type for heavy make-up and pearls, but she never left the house without her short gray hair neatly styled, her linen pants crisply starched, her underwear clean and still elasticized.

Andy barely made it out of the apartment most days. She was constantly having to double back for something she had forgotten like her phone or her ID badge for work or, one time, her sneakers because she’d walked out of the building wearing her bedroom slippers.

Whenever people in New York asked Andy what her mother was like, she always thought of something Laura had said about her own mother: She always knew where all the tops were to her Tupperware.

Andy couldn’t be bothered to close a Ziploc bag.

On the phone, eight hundred miles away, Laura’s stuttered intake of breath was the only sign that this was difficult for her. “Andrea?”

Andy’s ears, buzzing with New York sounds, had zeroed back in on her mother’s voice.

Cancer.

Andy tried to grunt. She could not make the noise. This was shock. This was fear. This was unfettered terror because the world had suddenly stopped spinning and everything—the failures, the disappointments, the horror of Andy’s New York existence for the last six years—receded like the drawback wave of a tsunami. Things that should’ve never been uncovered were suddenly out in the open.

Her mother had cancer.

She could be dying.

She could die.

Laura had said, “So, there’s chemo, which will by all accounts be very difficult.” She was used to filling Andy’s protracted silences, had learned long ago that confronting her on them was more likely to end up in a fight than a resumption of civil conversation. “Then I’ll take a pill every day, and that’s that. The five-year survival rate is over seventy percent, so there’s not a lot to worry about except for getting through it.” A pause for breath, or maybe in hopes that Andy was ready to speak. “It’s very treatable, darling. I don’t want you to worry. Just stay where you are. There’s nothing you can do.”

A car horn had blared. Andy had looked up. She was standing statue-like in the middle of a crosswalk. She struggled to move. The phone was hot against her ear. It was past midnight. Sweat rolled down her back and leached from her armpits like melted butter. She could hear the canned laughter of a sitcom, bottles clinking, and an anonymous piercing scream for help, the likes of which she had learned to tune out her first month living in the city.

Too much silence on her end of the phone. Finally, her mother had prompted, “Andrea?”

Andy had opened her mouth without considering what words should come out.

“Darling?” her mother had said, still patient, still generously nice in the way that her mother was to everyone she met. “I can hear the street noises, otherwise I’d think we’d lost the connection.” She paused again. “Andrea, I really need you to acknowledge what I’m telling you. It’s important.”

Her mouth was still hanging open. The sewer smell that was endemic to her neighborhood had stuck to the back of her nasal passages like a piece of overcooked spaghetti slapped onto a kitchen cabinet. Another car horn blared. Another woman screamed for help. Another ball of sweat rolled down Andy’s back and pooled in the waistband of her underwear. The elastic was torn where her thumb went when she pulled them down.

Andy still could not recall how she’d managed to force herself out of her stupor, but she remembered the words she had finally said to her mother: “I’m coming home.”

There had not been much to show for her six years in the city. Andy’s three part-time jobs had all been resigned from by text. Her subway card was given to a homeless woman who had thanked her, then screeched that she was a fucking whore. Only the absolutely necessary things went into Andy’s suitcase: favorite T-shirts, broken-in jeans, several books that had survived not just the trip from Belle Isle, but five different moves into progressively shittier apartments. Andy wouldn’t need her gloves or her puffy winter coat or her earmuffs back home. She didn’t bother to wash her sheets or even take them off the old Chesterfield sofa that was her bed. She had left for LaGuardia at the crack of dawn, less than six hours after her mother’s phone call. In the blink of an eye, Andy’s life in New York was over. The only thing the three younger, more accomplished roommates had to remember her by was the half-eaten Filet-O-Fish sandwich Andy had left in the fridge and her part of the next month’s rent.

That had been three years ago, almost half as many years as she had lived in the city. Andy didn’t want to, but in low moments she checked in with her former cohabitants on Facebook. They were her yardstick. Her truncheon. One had reached middle management at a fashion blog. The other had started her own bespoke sneaker design company. The third had died after a cocaine binge on a rich man’s yacht and still, some nights when Andy was answering calls and the person on the end of the line was a twelve-year-old who thought it was funny to call 911 and pretend he was being molested, she could not help but think that she remained the least accomplished of them all.

A yacht, for chrissakes.

A yacht.

“Darling?” her mother rapped the table for attention. The lunch crowd had thinned out. A man seated at the front gave her an angry look over his newspaper. “Where are you?”

Andy held out her arms again, indicating the restaurant, but the gesture felt forced. They knew exactly where she was: less than five miles from where she had started.

Andy had gone to New York City thinking she would find a way to shine and ended up emitting the equivalent amount of light you’d find in an old emergency flashlight left in a kitchen drawer. She hadn’t wanted to be an actor or a model or any of the usual clichés. Stardom was never her dream. She had yearned to be star-adjacent: the personal assistant, the coffee fetcher, the prop wrangler, the scenery painter, the social media manager, the support staff that made the star’s life possible. She wanted to bask in the glow. To be in the middle of things. To know people. To have connections.

Her professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design had seemed like a good connection. She had dazzled him with her passion for the arts, or at least that’s what he’d claimed. That they were in bed when he’d said this only mattered to Andy after the fact. When she’d broken off the affair, the man had taken as a threat her idle chatter about wanting to focus on her career. Before Andy knew what was happening, before she could explain to her professor that she wasn’t trying to leverage his gross inappropriateness into career advancement, he had pulled some strings to get her a job as an assistant to the assistant scenery designer in an off-Broadway show.

Off-Broadway!

Just down the street from on Broadway!

Andy was two semesters away from earning her degree in technical theater arts. She had packed her suitcase and barely did more than toss a wave over her shoulder as she headed to the airport.

Two months later, the show had closed under crushingly bad reviews.

Everyone on the crew had quickly found other jobs, joined other shows, except for Andy, who had settled into a real New York life. She was a waitress, a dog walker, a sign painter, a telephone debt collector, a delivery person, a fax machine monitor, a sandwich maker, a non-unionized copier paper feeder, and finally, the loser bitch who had left a half-eaten Filet-O-Fish in the fridge and one month’s rent on the counter and run off to Buttfuck, Georgia, or wherever the hell it was that she was from.

Really, all Andy had brought home with her was one tiny shred of dignity, and now she was going to waste it on her mother.

She looked up from the eggs.

“Mom.” She had to clear her throat before she could get out the confession. “I love you for saying that, but it’s not your fault. You’re right that I wanted to come home to see you. But I stayed for other reasons.”

Laura frowned. “What other reasons? You loved New York.”

She had hated New York.

“You were doing so well up there.”

She had been drowning.

“That boy you were seeing was so into you.”

And every other vagina in his building.

“You had so many friends.”

She had not heard from one of them since she’d left.

“Well.” Laura sighed. The list of encouragements had been short if not probing. As usual, she had read Andy like a book. “Baby, you’ve always wanted to be somebody different. Someone special. I mean in the sense of someone with a gift, an unusual talent. Of course you’re special to me and Dad.”

Andy’s eyes strained to roll up in her head. “Thanks.”

“You are talented. You’re smart. You’re better than smart. You’re clever.”

Andy ran her hands up and down her face as if she could erase herself from this conversation. She knew she was talented and smart. The problem was that in New York, everyone else had been talented and smart, too. Even the guy working the counter at the bodega was funnier, quicker, more clever than she was.

Laura insisted, “There’s nothing wrong with being normal. Normal people have very meaningful lives. Look at me. It’s not selling out to enjoy yourself.”

Andy said, “I’m thirty-one years old, I haven’t gone on a real date in three years, I have sixty-three thousand dollars in student debt for a degree I never finished and I live in a one-room apartment over my mother’s garage.” Air strained through Andy’s nose as she tried to breathe. Verbalizing the long list had put a tight band around her chest. “The question isn’t what else can I do. It’s what else am I going to fuck up?”

“You’re not fucking up.”

“Mom—”

“You’ve fallen into the habit of feeling low. You can get used to anything, especially bad things. But the only direction now is up. You can’t fall off the floor.”

“Have you ever heard of basements?”

“Basements have floors, too.”

“That’s the ground.”

“But ground is just another word for floor.”

“Ground is like, six feet under.”

“Why do you always have to be so morbid?”

Andy felt a sudden irritation honing her tongue into a razor. She swallowed it back down. They couldn’t argue about curfew or make-up or tight jeans anymore, so these were the fights that she now had with her mother: That basements had floors. The proper direction from which toilet paper should come off the roll. Whether forks should be placed in the dishwasher tines up or tines down. If a grocery cart was called a cart or a buggy. That Laura was pronouncing it wrong when she called the cat “Mr. Perkins” because his name was actually Mr. Purrkins.

Laura said, “I was working with a patient the other day, and the strangest thing happened.”

The cliffhanger-change-of-subject was one of their well-worn paths to truce.

“So strange,” Laura baited.

Andy hesitated, then nodded for her to continue.

“He presented with Broca’s Aphasia. Some right-side paralysis.” Laura was a licensed speech pathologist living in a coastal retirement community. The majority of her patients had experienced some form of debilitating stroke. “He was an IT guy in his previous life, but I guess that doesn’t matter.”

“What happened that was strange?” Andy asked, doing her part.

Laura smiled. “He was telling me about his grandson’s wedding, and I have no idea what he was trying to say, but it came out as ‘blue suede shoes.’ And I had this flash in my head, this sort of memory, to back when Elvis died.”

“Elvis Presley?”

She nodded. “This was ’77, so I would’ve been fourteen years old, more Rod Stewart than Elvis. But anyway. There were these very conservative, beehived ladies at our church, and they were bawling their eyes out that he was gone.”

Andy grinned the way you grin when you know you’re missing something.

Laura gave her the same grin back. Chemo brain, even this far out from her last treatment. She had forgotten the point of her story. “It’s just a funny thing I remembered.”

“I guess the beehive ladies were kind of hypocritical?” Andy tried to jog her memory. “I mean, Elvis was really sexy, right?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Laura patted her hand. “I’m so grateful for you. The strength you gave me while I was sick. The closeness we still have. I cherish that. It’s a gift.” Her mother’s voice started to quiver. “But I’m better now. And I want you to live your life. I want you to be happy, or, failing that, I want you to find peace with yourself. And I don’t think you can do it here, baby. As much as I want to make it easier for you, I know that it’ll never take unless you do it all on your own.”

Andy looked up at the ceiling. She looked out at the empty mall. She finally looked back at her mother.

Laura had tears in her eyes. She shook her head as if in awe. “You’re magnificent. Do you know that?”

Andy forced out a laugh.

“You are magnificent because you are so uniquely you.” Laura pressed her hand to her heart. “You are talented, and you are beautiful, and you’ll find your way, my love, and it will be the right way, no matter what, because it’s the path that you set out for yourself.”

Andy felt a lump in her throat. Her eyes started to water. There was a stillness around them. She could hear the sound of her own blood swooshing through her veins.

“Well.” Laura laughed, another well-worn tactic for lightening an emotional moment. “Gordon thinks I should give you a deadline to move out.”

Gordon. Andy’s father. He was a trusts and estates lawyer. His entire life was deadlines.

Laura said, “But I’m not going to give you a deadline, or an ultimatum.”

Gordon loved ultimatums, too.

“I’m saying if this is your life”—she indicated the police-like, adult-ish uniform—“then embrace it. Accept it. And if you want to do something else”—she squeezed Andy’s hand—“do something else. You’re still young. You don’t have a mortgage or even a car payment. You have your health. You’re smart. You’re free to do whatever you like.”

“Not with my student loan debt.”

“Andrea,” Laura said, “I don’t want to be a doomsayer, but if you continue listlessly spinning around, pretty soon you’ll be forty and find yourself very tired of living inside of a cartwheel.”

“Forty,” Andy repeated, an age that seemed less decrepit every year it drew closer.

“Your father would say—”

“Shit or get off the pot.” Gordon was always telling Andy to move, to make something of herself, to do something. For a long time, she had blamed him for her lethargy. When both of your parents were driven, accomplished people, it was a form of rebellion to be lazy, right? To stubbornly and consistently take the easy road when the hard road was just so … hard?

“Dr. Oliver?” an older woman said. That she was invading a quiet mother–daughter moment seemed to be lost on her. “I’m Betsy Barnard. You worked with my father last year. I just wanted to say thank you. You’re a miracle worker.”

Laura stood up to shake the woman’s hand. “You’re very sweet to say that, but he did the work himself.” She slipped into what Andy thought of as her Healing Dr. Oliver Mode, asking open-ended questions about the woman’s father, clearly not quite remembering who he was but making a passable effort so that the woman was just as clearly fooled.

Laura nodded toward Andy. “This is my daughter, Andrea.”

Betsy duplicated the nod with a passing interest. She was beaming under Laura’s attention. Everyone loved her mother, no matter what mode she was in: therapist, friend, business owner, cancer patient, mother. She had a sort of relentless kindness that was kept from being too sugary by her quick, sometimes acerbic wit.

Occasionally, usually after a few drinks, Andy could show these same qualities to strangers, but once they got to know her, they seldom stuck around. Maybe that was Laura’s secret. She had dozens, even hundreds, of friends, but not one single person knew all of the pieces of her.

“Oh!” Betsy practically shouted. “I want you to meet my daughter, too. I’m sure Frank told you all about her.”

“Frank sure did.” Andy caught the relief on Laura’s face; she really had forgotten the man’s name. She winked at Andy, momentarily switching back into Mom Mode.

“Shelly!” Betsy frantically waved over her daughter. “Come meet the woman who helped save Pop-Pop’s life.”

A very pretty young blonde reluctantly shuffled over. She tugged self-consciously at the long sleeves of her red UGA T-shirt. The white bulldog on her chest was wearing a matching red shirt. She was obviously mortified, still at that age when you didn’t want a mother unless you needed money or compassion. Andy could remember what that push-pull felt like. Most days, she wasn’t as far removed from it as she wanted to be. It was a truth universally acknowledged that your mother was the only person in the world who could say, “Your hair looks nice,” but what you heard was, “Your hair always looks awful except for this one, brief moment in time.”

“Shelly, this is Dr. Oliver.” Betsy Barnard looped a possessive arm through her daughter’s. “Shelly’s about to start UGA in the fall. Isn’t that right, sweetie?”

Laura said, “I went to UGA, too. Of course, this was back when we took notes on stone tablets.”

Shelly’s mortification amped up a few degrees as her mother laughed a little too loudly at the stale joke. Laura tried to smooth things over, politely questioning the girl on her major, her dreams, her aspirations. This was the type of prying you took as a personal affront when you were young, but as an adult, you realized these were the only types of questions adults knew how to ask you.

Andy looked down at her half-filled coffee cup. She felt unreasonably tired. Night shifts. She couldn’t get used to them, only handled them by stringing together naps, which meant that she ended up stealing toilet paper and peanut butter from her mother’s pantry because she never made time to go to the grocery store. That was probably why Laura had insisted they have a birthday lunch today instead of a birthday breakfast, which would’ve allowed Andy to return to her cave over the garage and fall asleep in front of the TV.

She drank the last of her coffee, which was so cold it hit the back of her throat like crushed ice. She looked for the waitress. The girl had her nose buried in her phone. Her shoulders were slouched. She was smacking gum.

Andy suppressed the wave of bitchiness as she stood up from the table. The older she got, the harder it was to resist the urge to become her mother. Though, in retrospect, Laura had often had good advice: Stand up straight or your back will hurt when you’re thirty. Wear better shoes or you’ll pay for it when you’re thirty. Establish sensible habits or you’ll pay for it when you’re thirty.

Andy was thirty-one. She was paying so much that she was practically bankrupt.

“You a cop?” The waitress finally looked up from her phone.

“Theater major.”

The girl wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know what that means.”

“You and me both.”

Andy helped herself to more coffee. The waitress kept giving her sideways glances. Maybe it was the police-like uniform. The girl looked like the type who would have some Molly or at least a bag of weed stashed in her purse. Andy was wary of the uniform, too. Gordon had gotten her the job. She figured he was hoping she would eventually join the force. At first, Andy had been repulsed by the idea because she’d had it in her head that cops were bad guys. Then she had met some actual cops and realized they were mostly decent human beings trying to do a really shitty job. Then she had worked dispatch for a year and started to hate the entire world, because two thirds of the calls were just stupid people who didn’t understand what an emergency was.

Laura was still talking with Betsy and Shelly Barnard. Andy had seen this same scene play out countless times. They didn’t quite know how to gracefully exit and Laura was too polite to move them along. Instead of returning to the table, Andy walked over to the plate glass window. The diner was in a prime location inside the Mall of Belle Isle, a corner unit on the bottom floor. Past the boardwalk, the Atlantic Ocean roiled from a coming storm. People were walking their dogs or riding their bikes along the flat stretch of packed sand.

Belle Isle was neither belle nor, technically, an isle. It was basically a man-made peninsula created when the Army Corps of Engineers had dredged the port of Savannah back in the eighties. They had intended the new landmass to be an uninhabited, natural barrier against hurricanes, but the state had seen dollar signs on the new beachfront. Within five years of the dredging, more than half the surface area was covered in concrete: beach villas, townhouses, condos, shopping malls. The rest was tennis courts and golf courses. Retired Northerners played in the sun all day, drank martinis at sunset and called 911 when their neighbors left their trash cans by the street too long.

“Jesus,” somebody whispered, low and mean, but with a tinge of surprise, all at the same time.

The air had changed. That was the only way to describe it. The fine hairs on the back of Andy’s neck stood up. A chill went down her spine. Her nostrils flared. Her mouth went dry. Her eyes watered.

There was a sound like a jar popping open.

Andy turned.

The handle of the coffee cup slipped from her fingers. Her eyes followed its path to the floor. White ceramic shards bounced off the white tiles.

There had been an eerie silence before, but now there was chaos. Screaming. Crying. People running, ducked down, hands covering their heads.

Bullets.

Pop-pop.

Shelly Barnard was lying on the floor. On her back. Arms splayed. Legs twisted. Eyes wide open. Her red T-shirt looked wet, stuck to her chest. Blood dribbled from her nose. Andy watched the thin red line slide down her cheek and into her ear.

She was wearing tiny Bulldog earrings.

“No!” Betsy Barnard wailed. “N—”

Pop.

Andy saw the back of the woman’s throat vomit out in a spray of blood.

Pop.

The side of Betsy’s skull snapped open like a plastic bag.

She fell sideways onto the floor. On top of her daughter. Onto her dead daughter.

Dead.

“Mom,” Andy whispered, but Laura was already there. She was running toward Andy with her arms out, knees bent low. Her mouth was open. Her eyes were wide with fear. Red dots peppered her face like freckles.

The back of Andy’s head slammed into the window as she was tackled to the ground. She felt the rush of air from her mother’s mouth as the wind was knocked out of her. Andy’s vision blurred. She could hear a cracking sound. She looked up. The glass above her had started to spiderweb.

“Please!” Laura screamed. She had rolled over, was on her knees, then her feet. “Please, stop.”

Andy blinked. She rubbed her fists into her eyes. Grit cut into her eyelids. Dirt? Glass? Blood?

“Please!” Laura shouted.

Andy blinked again.

Then again.

A man was pointing a gun at her mother’s chest. Not a cop’s gun, but the kind with a cylinder like in the Old West. He was dressed the part—black jeans, black shirt with pearl buttons, black leather vest and black cowboy hat. Gunbelt hanging low on his hips. One holster for the gun, a long leather sheath for a hunting knife.

Handsome.

His face was young, unlined. He was Shelly’s age, maybe a little older.

But Shelly was dead now. She would not be going to UGA. She would never be mortified by her mother again because her mother was dead, too.

And now the man who had murdered them both was pointing a gun at her mother’s chest.

Andy sat up.

Laura only had one breast, the left one, over her heart. The surgeon had taken the right one and she hadn’t gotten reconstructive surgery yet because she couldn’t stand the thought of going to yet another doctor, having another procedure, and now this murderer standing in front of her was going to put a bullet in it.

“Mm—” The word got caught in Andy’s throat. She could only think it—

Mom.

“It’s all right.” Laura’s voice was calm, controlled. She had her hands out in front of her like they could catch the bullets. She told the man, “You can leave now.”

“Fuck you.” His eyes darted to Andy. “Where’s your gun, you fucking pig?”

Andy’s whole body cringed. She felt herself tightening into a ball.

“She doesn’t have a gun,” Laura said, her voice still composed. “She’s a secretary at the police station. She’s not a cop.”

“Get up!” he screamed at Andy. “I see your badge! Get up, pig! Do your job!”

Laura said, “It’s not a badge. It’s an emblem. Just stay calm.” She patted her hands down the same way she used to tuck Andy into bed at night. “Andy, listen to me.”

“Listen to me, you fucking bitches!” Saliva flew from the man’s mouth. He shook the gun in the air. “Stand up, pig. You’re next.”

“No.” Laura blocked his way. “I’m next.”

His eyes turreted back to Laura.

“Shoot me.” Laura spoke with unmistakable certainty. “I want you to shoot me.”

Confusion broke the mask of anger that was his face. He hadn’t planned for this. People were supposed to be terrified, not volunteer.

“Shoot me,” she repeated.

He peered over Laura’s shoulder at Andy, then looked back.

“Do it,” Laura said. “You only have one bullet left. You know that. There are only six bullets in the gun.” She held up her hands showing four fingers on her left hand, one on her right. “It’s why you haven’t pulled the trigger yet. There’s only one bullet left.”

“You don’t know—”

“Only one more.” She waved her thumb, indicating the sixth bullet. “When you shoot me, my daughter will run out of here. Right, Andy?”

What?

“Andy,” her mother said. “I need you to run, darling.”

What?

“He can’t reload fast enough to hurt you.”

“Fuck!” the man screamed, trying to get his rage back. “Be still! Both of you.”

“Andy.” Laura took a step toward the gunman. She was limping. A tear in her linen pants was weeping blood. Something white stuck out like bone. “Listen to me, sweetheart.”

“I said don’t move!”

“Go through the kitchen door.” Laura’s voice remained steady. “There’s an exit in the back.”

What?

“Stop there, bitch. Both of you.”

“You need to trust me,” Laura said. “He can’t reload in time.”

Mom.

“Get up.” Laura took another step forward. “I said, get up.”

Mom, no.

“Andrea Eloise.” She was using her Mother voice, not her Mom voice. “Get up. Now.”

Andy’s body worked of its own volition. Left foot flat, right heel up, fingers touching the ground, a runner at the block.

“Stop it!” The man jerked the gun toward Andy, but Laura moved with it. He jerked it back and she followed the path, blocking Andy with her body. Shielding her from the last bullet in the gun.

“Shoot me,” Laura told the man. “Go ahead.”

“Fuck this.”

Andy heard a snap.

The trigger pulling back? The hammer hitting the bullet?

Her eyes had squeezed closed, hands flew to cover her head.

But there was nothing.

No bullet fired. No cry of pain.

No sound of her mother falling dead to the ground.

Floor. Ground. Six feet under.

Andy cringed as she looked back up.

The man had unsnapped the sheath on the hunting knife.

He was slowly drawing it out.

Six inches of steel. Serrated on one side. Sharp on the other.

He holstered the gun, tossed the knife into his dominant hand. He didn’t have the blade pointing up the way you’d hold a steak knife but down, the way you’d stab somebody.

Laura asked, “What are you going to do with that?”

He didn’t answer. He showed her.

Two steps forward.

The knife arced up, then slashed down toward her mother’s heart.

Andy was paralyzed, too terrified to ball herself up, too shocked to do anything but watch her mother die.

Laura stuck out her hand as if she could block the knife. The blade sliced straight into the center of her palm. Instead of collapsing, or screaming, Laura’s fingers wrapped around the hilt of the knife.

There was no struggle. The murderer was too surprised.

Laura wrenched the knife away from his grip even as the long blade was still sticking out of her hand.

He stumbled back.

He looked at the knife jutting out of her hand.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three.

He seemed to remember the gun on his hip. His right hand reached down. His fingers wrapped around the handle. The silver flashed on the muzzle. His left hand swung around to cup the weapon as he prepared to fire the last bullet into her mother’s heart.

Silently, Laura swung her arm, backhanding the blade into the side of his neck.

Crunch, like a butcher cutting a side of beef.

The sound had an echo that bounced off the corners of the room.

The man gasped. His mouth fished open. His eyes widened.

The back of Laura’s hand was still pinned to his neck, caught between the handle and the blade.

Andy saw her fingers move.

There was a clicking sound. The gun shaking as he tried to raise it.

Laura spoke, more growl than words.

He kept lifting the gun. Tried to aim.

Laura raked the blade out through the front of his throat.

Blood, sinew, cartilage.

No spray or mist like before. Everything gushed out of his open neck like a dam breaking open.

His black shirt turned blacker. The pearl buttons showed different shades of pink.

The gun dropped first.

Then his knees hit the floor. Then his chest. Then his head.

Andy watched his eyes as he fell.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

2

When Andy was in the ninth grade, she’d had a crush on a boy named Cletus Laraby, who went by Cleet, but in an ironic way. He had floppy brown hair and he knew how to play the guitar and he was the smartest guy in their chemistry class, so Andy tried to learn how to play the guitar and pretended to be interested in chemistry, too.

This was how she ended up entering the school’s science fair: Cleet signed up, so Andy did, too.

She had never spoken a word to him in her life.

No one questioned the wisdom of giving a drama club kid who barely passed earth sciences access to ammonium nitrate and ignition switches, but in retrospect, Dr. Finney was probably so pleased Andy was interested in something other than mime arts that she had looked the other way.

Andy’s father, too, was elated by the news. Gordon took Andy to the library where they checked out books on engineering and rocket design. He filled out a form for a loyalty card from the local hobby shop. Over the dinner table, he would read aloud from pamphlets from the American Association for Rocketry.

Whenever Andy was staying at her dad’s house, Gordon worked in the garage with his sanding blocks, shaping the fins and nose cone shoulders, while Andy sat at his workbench and sketched out designs for the tube.

Andy knew that Cleet liked the Goo Goo Dolls because he had a sticker on his backpack, so she started out thinking the tube of the rocket would look like a steampunk telescope from the video for “Iris,” then she thought about putting wings on it because “Iris” was from the movie City of Angels, then she decided that she would put Nicolas Cage’s face on the side, in profile, because he was the angel in the movie, then she decided that she should paint Meg Ryan instead because this was for Cleet and he would probably think that Meg Ryan was a lot more interesting than Nicolas Cage.

A week before the fair, Andy had to turn in all of her notes and photographs to Dr. Finney to prove that she had actually done all of the work herself. She was laying out the dubious evidence on the teacher’s desk when Cleet Laraby walked in. Andy had to clasp together her hands to keep them from trembling when Cleet stopped to look at the photos.

“Meg Ryan,” Cleet said. “I dig it. Blow up the bitch, right?”

Andy felt a cold slice of air cut open her lips.

“My girlfriend loves that stupid movie. The one with the angels?” Cleet showed her the sticker on his backpack. “They wrote that shitty song for the soundtrack, man. That’s why I keep this here, to remind me never to sell out my art like those faggots.”

Andy didn’t move. She couldn’t speak.

Girlfriend. Stupid. Shitty. Man. Faggots.

Andy had left Dr. Finney’s classroom without her notes or her books or even her purse. She’d walked through the cafeteria, then out the exit door that was always propped open so the lunch ladies could smoke cigarettes behind the Dumpster.

Gordon lived two miles away from the school. It was June. In Georgia. On the coast. By the time she reached his house, Andy was badly sunburned and soaked in her own sweat and tears. She took the Meg Ryan rocket and the two Nicolas Cage test rockets and threw them in the outdoor trash can. Then she soaked them with lighter fluid. Then she threw a match into the can. Then she woke up on her back in Gordon’s driveway because a neighbor was squirting her down with the garden hose.

The whoosh of fire had singed off Andy’s eyebrows, eyelashes, bangs and nose hairs. The sound of the explosion was so intense that Andy’s ears had started to bleed. The neighbor started screaming in her face. His wife, a nurse, came over and was clearly trying to tell Andy something, but the only thing she could hear was a sharp tone, like when her chorus teacher blew a single note on her pitch pipe—

Eeeeeeeeeeee …

Andy heard The Sound, and nothing but The Sound, for four whole days.

Waking. Trying to sleep. Bathing. Walking to the kitchen. Sitting in front of the television. Reading notes her mother and father furiously scratched out on a dry erase board.

We don’t know what’s wrong.

Probably temporary.

Don’t cry.

Eeeeeeeeeeee …

That had been almost twenty years ago. Andy hadn’t thought much about the explosion until now, and that was only because The Sound was back. When it returned, or when she became aware of the return, she was standing in the diner by her mother, who was seated in a chair. There were three dead people on the floor. On the ground. The murderer, his black shirt even blacker. Shelly Barnard, her red shirt even redder. Betsy Barnard, the bottom part of her face hanging by strands of muscle and sinew.

Andy had looked up from the bodies. People were standing outside the restaurant. Mall shoppers with Abercrombie and Juicy bags and Starbucks coffees and Icees. Some of them had been crying. Some of them had been taking pictures.

Andy had felt pressure on her arm. Laura was struggling to turn the chair away from the gawkers. Every movement had a stuttering motion to Andy’s eye, like she was watching a stop-action movie. Laura’s hand shook as she tried to wrap a tablecloth around her bleeding leg. The white thing sticking out was not a bone but a shard of broken china. Laura was right-handed, but the knife jutting from her left hand made wrapping her leg impossible. She was talking to Andy, likely asking for help, but all Andy could hear was The Sound.

“Andy,” Laura had said.

Eeeeeeeeeeee …

“Andrea.”

Andy stared at her mother’s mouth, wondering if she was hearing the word or reading the word on her lips—so familiar that her brain processed it as heard rather than seen.

“Andy,” Laura repeated. “Help me.”

That had come through, a muffled request like her mother was speaking through a long tube.

“Andy,” Laura had grabbed both of Andy’s hands in her own. Her mother was bent over in the chair, obviously in pain. Andy had knelt down. She’d started knotting the tablecloth.

Tie it tight—

That’s what Andy would have said to a panicked caller on the dispatch line: Don’t worry about hurting her. Tie the cloth as tight as you can to stop the bleeding.

It was different when your hands were the ones tying the cloth. Different when the pain you saw was registered on your own mother’s face.

“Andy.” Laura had waited for her to look up.

Andy’s eyes had trouble focusing. She wanted to pay attention. She needed to pay attention.

Her mother had grabbed Andy by the chin, given her a hard shake to knock her out of her stupor.

She had said, “Don’t talk to the police. Don’t sign a statement. Tell them you can’t remember anything.”

What?

“Promise me,” Laura had insisted. “Don’t talk to the police.”

Four hours later, Andy still hadn’t talked to the police, but that was more because the police had not talked to her. Not at the diner, not in the ambulance and not now.

Andy was waiting outside the closed doors to the surgical suite while the doctors operated on Laura. She was slumped in a hard plastic chair. She had refused to lie down, refused to take the nurse up on the offer of a bed, because nothing was wrong with her. Laura needed the help. And Shelly. And Shelly’s mother, whose name Andy could not now remember.

Who was Mrs. Barnard, really, if not a mother to her child?

Andy sat back in the chair. She had to turn a certain way to keep the bruise on her head from throbbing. The plate glass window overlooking the boardwalk. Andy remembered her mother tackling her to the ground. The pounding at the back of her head as her skull cracked against the window. The spiderwebbing glass. The way Laura quickly scrambled to stand. The way she had looked and sounded so calm.

The way she had held up her fingers—four on the left hand, one on the right—as she explained to the shooter that he only had one bullet left out of the six he had started with.

Andy rubbed her face with her hands. She did not look at the clock, because looking up at the clock every time she wanted to would make the hours stretch out interminably. She ran her tongue along her fillings. The metal ones had been drilled out and replaced with composite, but she could still remember how The Sound had made them almost vibrate inside her molars. Into her jaw. Up into her skull. A vise-like noise that made her brain feel as if it was going to implode.

Eeeeeeeeeeee …

Andy squeezed her eyes shut. Immediately, the images started scrolling like one of Gordon’s vacation slide shows.

Laura holding up her hand.

The long blade slicing into her palm.

Wrenching the knife away.

Backhanding the blade into the man’s neck.

Blood.

So much blood.

Jonah Helsinger. That was the murderer’s name. Andy knew it—she wasn’t sure how. Was it on the dispatch radio when she rode in the ambulance with her mother? Was it on the news blaring from the TV when Andy was led into the triage waiting room? Was it on the nurses’ lips as they led her up to the surgical wing?

“Jonah Helsinger,” someone had whispered, the way you’d whisper that someone had cancer. “The killer’s name is Jonah Helsinger.”

“Ma’am?” A Savannah police officer was standing in front of Andy.

“I don’t—” Andy tried to recall what her mother had told her to say. “I can’t remember.”

“Ma’am,” the officer repeated, which was weird because she was older than Andy. “I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s a man. He says he’s your father, but—”

Andy looked up the hall.

Gordon was standing by the elevators.

She was up and running before she could think about it. Gordon met her halfway, grabbing her in a bear hug, holding her so close that she could feel his heart pounding in his chest. She pressed her face into his starched white shirt. He had been at work, dressed in his usual three-piece suit. His reading glasses were still on top of his head. His Montblanc pen was tucked into his shirt pocket. The metal was cold against the tip of her ear.

Andy had been losing her shit in little pieces since the shooting began, but in her father’s arms, finally safe, she completely lost it. She started to cry so hard that she couldn’t support her own weight. Gordon half lifted, half dragged her to a set of chairs against the wall. He held onto her so tightly that she had to take shallow breaths to breathe.

“I’m here,” he told her, again and again. “I’m here, baby. I’m here.”

“Daddy,” she said, the word coming out around a sob.

“It’s okay.” Gordon stroked back her hair. “You’re safe now. Everybody’s safe.”

Andy kept crying. She cried so long that she began to feel self-conscious, like it was too much. Laura was alive. Bad things had happened, but Laura was going to be okay. Andy was going to be okay. She had to be okay.

“It’s okay,” Gordon murmured. “Just let it all out.”

Andy sniffed back her tears. She tried to regain her composure. And tried. Every time she thought she might be all right, she remembered another detail—the sound of the first gunshot, like a jar popping open, the thwack as her mother lodged the knife into flesh and bone—and the tears started to fall again.

“It’s all right,” Gordon said, patiently stroking her head. “Everybody’s okay, sweetheart.”

Andy wiped her nose. She took a shaky breath. Gordon leaned up in the chair, still holding onto her, and pulled out his handkerchief.

Andy blotted away her tears, blew her nose. “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for.” Gordon pushed her hair back out of her eyes. “Were you hurt?”

She shook her head. Blew her nose again until her ears popped.

The Sound was gone.

She closed her eyes, relief taking hold.

“All right?” Gordon asked. His hand was warm against her back. She felt anchored again. “You okay?”

Andy opened her eyes. Her nerves still felt raw, but she had to tell her father what had happened. “Mom—she had a knife, and this guy, she mur—”

“Shhh,” he hushed, pressing his fingers to her lips. “Mom’s okay. We’re all okay.”

“But—”

He put his finger back to her lips to keep her quiet. “I talked to the doctor. Mom’s in recovery. Her hand is going to be fine. Her leg is fine. It’s all fine.” He raised an eyebrow, tilted his head slightly to the right where the cop was standing. The woman was on the phone, but she was clearly listening.

Gordon asked Andy, “You sure you’re okay? Did they check you out?”

She nodded.

“You’re just tired, baby. You were up all night working. You saw something horrible happen. Your life was in danger. Your mother’s life was in danger. It’s understandable you’re in shock. You need some rest, give your memories some time to piece themselves together.” His tone was measured. Andy realized that Gordon was coaching her. “All right?”

She nodded because he was nodding. Why was he telling her what to say? Had he talked to Laura? Was her mother in trouble?

She had killed a man. Of course she was in trouble.

The police officer said, “Ma’am, do you mind giving me some basic information? Full name, address, birthdate, that kind of thing.”

“I’ll provide that, Officer.” Gordon waited for the woman to pull out her pen and notebook before he complied.

Andy tucked herself back underneath his protective arm. She swallowed so hard that her throat clicked.

And then she made herself look at the situation as a human being out in the world rather than a terrified spectator.

This wasn’t one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the streets, or an abusive spouse finally crossing the last line. A white kid had shot two white women, then was killed by another white woman, in one of the most affluent malls in the state.

News trucks would probably come down from Atlanta and Charleston. Lawyers would intervene for the families, the victims, the mall management, the city, the county, maybe even the feds. An array of police forces would descend: Belle Isle, Savannah, Chatham County, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Witness statements. Forensics. Photographs. Autopsies. Evidence collection.

Part of Andy’s job in radio dispatch was to assign case numbers for crimes on a far smaller scale, and she often tracked their progress over the months, sometimes years, it took for a case to go to trial. She of all people should have known that her mother’s actions would be scrutinized at every single level of the criminal justice system.

As if on cue, there was a loud ding from the elevator. The cop’s leather gunbelt made a squeaking noise as she adjusted it on her hips. The doors slid open. A man and a woman walked into the hallway. Both in wrinkled suits. Both with tired looks on their faces. The guy was bald and bloated with patches of peeling sunburn on his nose. The woman was around Andy’s height, at least ten years older, with olive skin and dark hair.

Andy started to stand, but Gordon kept her in the chair.

“Ms. Oliver.” The woman took out her badge and showed it to Andy. “I’m Detective Sergeant Lisa Palazzolo. This is Detective Brant Wilkes. We’re with the Savannah Police Department. We’re assisting Belle Isle with the investigation.” She tucked her badge back into her jacket pocket. “We need to talk to you about what happened this morning.”

Andy’s mouth opened, but again, she couldn’t remember what her mother had told her to say, or what Gordon had coached her to say, so she reverted to her default response which was to close her mouth and stare blankly at the person who had asked the question.

Gordon said, “This isn’t a good time, Detectives. My daughter is in shock. She’s not yet ready to give her statement.”

Wilkes huffed a disapproving grunt. “You’re her father?”

Andy always forgot Gordon was black and she was white until someone else pointed it out to her.

“Yes, Detective. I’m her father.” Gordon’s tone was patient. He was used to this. Over the years, he’d smoothed the nerves of anxious teachers, concerned store clerks, and aggressively racist store security. “I’m Gordon Oliver, Laura’s ex-husband. Andrea’s adoptive father.”

Wilkes twisted his mouth to the side as he silently scrutinized the story.

Palazzolo said, “We’re real sorry about what happened, Mr. Oliver, but we need to ask Andrea some questions.”

Gordon repeated, “As I said, she isn’t prepared at the moment to discuss the incident.” He crossed his legs, casual, as if this was all a formality. “Andrea is a dispatch operator, which I’m sure you can tell from her uniform. She worked a night shift. She’s bone-tired. She witnessed a terrible tragedy. She’s not in any shape to give a statement.”

“It was a terrible tragedy,” Palazzolo agreed. “Three people are dead.”

“And my daughter could’ve been the fourth.” Gordon kept a protective arm around Andy’s shoulders. “We’d be happy to make an appointment to come to the station tomorrow.”

“This is an active murder investigation.”

“The suspect is dead,” Gordon reminded her. “There’s no clock on this, Detective. One more day won’t make a difference.”

Wilkes grunted again. “How old are you?”

Andy realized he was talking to her.

Gordon said, “She’s thirty-one. Her birthday is today.”

Andy suddenly remembered Gordon’s voicemail this morning, an off-key version of “Happy Birthday” in his deep baritone.

Wilkes said, “She’s a little old to let her daddy talk for her.”

Palazzolo rolled her eyes, but said, “Ms. Oliver, we’d really like it if you helped us get the chain of events down on paper. You’re the only witness who hasn’t given a statement.”

Andy knew that wasn’t true, because Laura was still coming round from the anesthesia.

Gordon said, “Detectives, if—”

“You her daddy or her fucking lawyer?” Wilkes demanded. “Because we can remove you from—”

Gordon stood up. He was at least a foot taller than Wilkes. “I happen to be a lawyer, Mr. Wilkes, and I can either school you on my daughter’s constitutional right to refuse this interrogation or I can file a formal complaint with your superiors.”

Andy could see the man’s eyes shifting back and forth, his mouth itching to put Gordon in his place.

Palazzolo said, “Brant, take a walk.”

Wilkes didn’t move.

“Brant, come on. Meet me in the cafeteria. Get something to eat.”

Wilkes glared at Gordon like an unneutered pitbull before stomping away.

Palazzolo said, “Mr. Oliver, I understand your daughter’s been through a lot today, but even though Savannah’s not what you’d call a sleepy town, we’re unaccustomed to triple homicides. We really need to get your daughter’s statement down. We need to know what happened.”

Gordon corrected, “Double homicide.”

“Right.” There was a moment of hesitation before Palazzolo spoke again. “Can we do this sitting down?” She offered Andy a conciliatory smile. “I work the night shift, too. I’ve been up eighteen hours straight with no end in sight.” She was dragging over a chair before Gordon could stop her. “Look, I’ll tell you what I know, and then if Andrea feels like it, she can tell me what she knows. Or not. Either way, you get to see our side of this thing.” She indicated the other chairs. “That’s a good deal, Mr. Oliver. I hope you’ll consider taking it.”

Andy looked up at her father. Triple homicide? Two people wounded? Why did it feel like the detective was not counting Laura among the injured?

“Mr. Oliver?” Palazzolo tapped the back of her chair, but didn’t sit. “What about it?”

Gordon looked down at Andy.

She had seen that look a thousand times before: Remember what I told you.

Andy nodded. She was, if anything, extraordinarily good at keeping her mouth shut.

“Great.” Palazzolo sat down with a sharp groan.

Gordon nudged Andy down so that he would be the one who was directly across from Palazzolo.

“Okay.” Palazzolo took out her notebook, but not her pen. She flipped through the pages. “The shooter’s name is Jonah Lee Helsinger. Eighteen years old. High school senior. Early acceptance into Florida State University. The young girl was Shelly Anne Barnard. She was at the diner with her mother, Elizabeth Leona Bernard; Betsy. Jonah Lee Helsinger is—was—the ex-boyfriend of Shelly. Her father says Shelly broke up with Helsinger two weeks ago. Wanted to do it before going to college next month. Helsinger didn’t take it well.”

Gordon cleared his throat. “That’s quite an understatement.”

She nodded, ignoring the sarcasm. “Unfortunately, law enforcement has had a lot of these cases to study over the years. We know that spree killings aren’t usually spur of the moment. They’re well-planned, well-executed operations that tend to get worked over in the back of the killer’s mind until something—an event like a break-up or an impending life change like going off to college—jumpstarts the plan. The first victim is generally a close female, which is why we were relieved to find Helsinger’s mother was out of town this morning. Business in Charleston. But the way Helsinger was dressed—the black hat, the vest and gunbelt he bought on Amazon six months ago—all that tells us that he put a lot of thought into how this was going to go down. The spark came when Shelly broke up with him, but the idea of it, the planning, was in his head for months.”

Spree killings.

The two words bounced around inside Andy’s head.

Gordon asked, “His victims were all women?”

“There was a man sitting in the restaurant. He was struck in the eye by shrapnel. Not sure if he’ll lose it or not. The eye.” She went back to Jonah Helsinger. “What we also know about spree killers is, they tend to plant explosive devices in their homes for maximum casualties. That’s why we got the state bomb squad to clear Helsinger’s bedroom before we went in. He had a pipe bomb wired to the doorknob. Faulty set-up. Probably got it off the internet. Nothing went boom, thank God.”

Andy opened her mouth so she could breathe. She had come face-to-face with this guy. He had almost killed Laura. Almost killed Andy. Murdered people. Tried to blow them up.

He had probably attended Belle Isle High School, the same as Andy.

“Helsinger,” Gordon said. “That name sounds familiar.”

“Yeah, the family’s pretty well known up in Bibb County. Anyway—”

“Well known,” Gordon repeated, but the two words were weighted in a way that Andy could not decipher.

Palazzolo obviously got their meaning. She held Gordon’s gaze for a moment before she continued, “Anyway—Jonah Helsinger left some school notebooks on his bed. Most of them were filled with drawings. Disturbing images, weird stuff. He had four more handguns, an AR-15 and a shotgun, so he chose to take the six-shooter and the knife for a reason. We think we know the reason. There was a file on his laptop called ‘Death Plan’ that contained two documents and a PDF.”

Andy felt a shudder work its way through her body. While she was getting ready for work last night, Jonah Helsinger was probably lying in bed, psyching himself up for his killing spree.

Palazzolo continued, “The PDF was a schematic of the diner, sort of like what you’d see an architect draw. One of the docs was a timeline, like a bullet point: wake up at this time, shower at this time, clean gun here, fill up car with gas there. The other doc was sort of like a diary entry where Helsinger wrote about how and why this was going to go down.” She referred to her notebook again. “His first targets were going to be Shelly and her mother. Apparently, they had a standing lunch date every Monday at the Rise-n-Dine. Shelly wrote about it on Facebook, Snapchatted her food or whatever. Mr. Barnard told us the lunches are something his wife and daughter decided to do together over the summer before college.”

“Were something they decided to do,” Gordon mumbled, because everything in the two women’s lives was past tense now.

“Were. Yeah,” Palazzolo said. “Helsinger planned to kill both of them. He blamed the mother for the break-up. He said in his diary that it was Betsy’s fault, that she was always pushing Shelly, blah blah blah. Crazy talk. It doesn’t matter, because we all know it’s Jonah Helsinger’s fault, right?”

“Right,” Gordon said, his voice firm.

Palazzolo held his gaze in that meaningful way again before she referred back to her notes. “This was his plan: after he killed Betsy and Shelly, Helsinger was going to take hostage whoever was left in the diner. He had a time noted—1:16, not the actual time but a notation of timing.” She looked up at Andy, then Gordon. “See, we think that he did a dry run. Last week, at approximately the same time as the shooting today, somebody threw a rock through the plate glass window that faces the boardwalk. We’re waiting for the security feed. The incident was filed with burglary division. It took the first mall cop about one minute, sixteen seconds, to get to the diner.”

The mall cops weren’t the usual rent-a-cops, but off-duty police officers hired to protect the high-end stores. Andy had seen the guns on their hips and never given it a second thought.

Palazzolo told them, “In Helsinger’s predicted timeline of the shooting, he allowed that he would have to kill at least one other bystander to let the cops know that he was serious. Then he was going to let the cops kill him. Helsinger must have thought his plan was fast-forwarded when he saw your uniform and assumed that you were law enforcement.” Palazzolo was talking directly to Andy now. “We gather from the other witnesses that he wanted you to shoot him. Suicide by cop.”

Except Andy was not a cop.

Get up! Do your job!

That’s what Helsinger had screamed at Andy.

Then Andy’s mother had said, “Shoot me.”

“He’s a really bad guy. Was a bad guy. This Helsinger kid.” Palazzolo was still focused on Andy. “We’ve got it all in his notes. He planned this out meticulously. He knew he was going to murder people. He hoped that he would murder even more people when somebody opened his bedroom door. He packed screws and nails into that pipe bomb. If the wiring hadn’t been switched on the doorknob end, the whole house would be gone, along with whoever happened to be inside. We would’ve found nails two blocks away buried in God knows who or what.”

Andy wanted to nod but she felt immobilized. Screws and nails flying through the air. What did it take to build such a device, to pack in all those projectiles in hopes that they would maim or kill people?

“You’re lucky,” Palazzolo told Andy. “If your mom hadn’t been there, he would’ve killed you. He was just a really bad guy.”

Andy felt the woman looking at her, but she kept her eyes directed toward the floor.

Bad guy.

Palazzolo kept repeating the phrase, like it was okay that Helsinger was dead. Like he had gotten what he deserved. Like whatever Laura had done was completely justified because Jonah Lee Helsinger was a bad guy.

Andy worked at a police station. Most of the people who got murdered would fall into the bad guy category, yet she had never heard any of the detectives harp on the fact that the victim was a bad guy.

“Mr. Oliver,” Palazzolo had turned to Gordon. “Has your wife had any military training?”

Gordon did not answer.

Palazzolo said, “Her background is pretty bland.” Again, she flipped through the pages in her notebook. “Born in Providence, Rhode Island. Attended the University of Rhode Island. Master’s and PhD from UGA. She’s lived in Belle Isle for twenty-eight years. House is paid off, which, congratulations. She could sell it for a bag of money—but, I get it, where would she go? One marriage, one divorce. No large outstanding debts. Pays her bills on time. Never left the country. Got a parking ticket three years ago that she paid online. She must’ve been one of the first people to buy here.” Palazzolo turned back toward Andy. “You were raised here, right?”

Andy stared at the woman. She had a mole near her ear, just under her jawline.

“You went to school on the Isle, then SCAD for college?”

Andy had spent the first two years of her life in Athens while Laura was finishing her doctorate, but the only thing she remembered about UGA was being scared of the neighbor’s parakeet.

“Ms. Oliver.” Palazzolo’s voice sounded strained. She was apparently used to having her questions answered. “Did your mother ever take any self-defense classes?”

Andy studied the mole. There were some short hairs sticking out of it.

“Yoga? Pilates? Tai chi?” Palazzolo waited. And waited. Then she closed her notebook. She put it back into her pocket. She reached into her other pocket. She pulled out her phone. She tapped at the screen. “I’m showing you this because it’s already on the news.” She swiped at the screen. “One of the patrons in the diner decided that it was more important to record what was happening on his cell phone than to call 911 or run for his life.”

She turned the phone around. The image was paused. Jonah Helsinger stood at the entrance to the restaurant. The lower half of his body was obscured by a trash can. The mall was empty behind him. From the angle, Andy knew the waitress standing in the back had not taken the video. She wondered if it was the man with the newspaper. The phone had been tilted just over the salt and pepper shakers, like he was trying to hide the fact that he was recording the weird kid who was dressed like the villain from a John Wayne movie.

Objectively, the hat was ridiculous; too large for Helsinger’s head, stiff on the top and curled up almost comically.

Andy might have filmed him, too.

Palazzolo said, “This is pretty graphic. They’re blurring the images on the news. Are you okay to see this?” She was talking to Gordon because, obviously, Andy had already seen it.

Gordon smoothed down his mustache with his finger and thumb as he considered the question. Andy knew he could handle it. He was asking himself if he really wanted to see it.

He finally decided. “Yes.”

Palazzolo snaked her finger around the edge of the phone and tapped the screen.

At first, Andy wondered if the touch had registered because Jonah Helsinger was not moving. For several seconds, he just stood there behind the trash can, staring blankly into the restaurant, his ten-gallon hat high on his shiny-looking forehead.

Two older women, mall walkers, strutted behind him. One of them clocked the western attire, elbowed the other, and they both laughed.

Muzak played in the background. Madonna’s ‘Dress You Up’.

Someone coughed. The tinny sound vibrated into Andy’s ears, and she wondered if she had registered any of these noises when they happened, when she was in the restaurant telling the waitress she was a theater major, when she was staring out the window at the waves cresting in the distance.

On the screen, Helsinger’s head moved to the right, then the left, as if he was scanning the restaurant. Andy knew there was not much to see. The place was half-empty, a handful of patrons enjoying a last cup of coffee or glass of tea before they did errands or played golf or, in Andy’s case, went to sleep.

Helsinger stepped away from the garbage can.

A man’s voice said, “Jesus.”

Andy remembered that word, the lowness and meanness to it, the hint of surprise.

The gun went up. A puff of smoke from the muzzle. A loud pop.

Shelly was shot in the back of the head. She sank to the floor like a paper doll.

Betsy Barnard started screaming.

The second bullet missed Betsy, but a loud cry said that it had hit someone else.

The third bullet came sharp on the heels of the second.

A cup on the table exploded into a million pieces. Shards flew through the air.

Laura was turning away from the shooter when one of the pieces lodged into her leg. The wound did not register in her mother’s expression. She started to run, but not away. She was closer to the mall entrance than to the back of the restaurant. She could’ve ducked under a table. She could’ve escaped.

Instead, she ran toward Andy.

Andy saw herself standing with her back now turned toward the window. Video-Andy dropped her coffee mug. The ceramic splintered. In the foreground, Betsy Barnard was being murdered. Bullet four was fired into her mouth, the fifth into her head. She fell on top of her daughter.

Then Laura tackled Andy to the ground.

There was a blink of stillness before Laura jumped up.

She patted her hands down the same way she used to tuck Andy into bed at night. The man in black, Jonah Lee Helsinger, had a gun pointed at Laura’s chest. In the distance, Andy could see herself. She was curled into a ball. The glass behind her was spiderwebbing. Chunks were falling down.

Sitting in the chair beside Gordon, Andy reached up and touched her hair. She pulled out a piece of glass from the tangles.

When she looked back down at Detective Palazzolo’s phone, the angle of the video had changed. The image was shaky, taken from behind the shooter. Whoever had made the recording was lying on the ground, just beyond an overturned table. The position afforded Andy a completely different perspective. Instead of facing the shooter, she was behind him now. Instead of watching her mother’s back, she could see Laura’s face. Her hands holding up six digits to indicate the total number of bullets. Her thumb wagging to show the one live round left in the chamber.

Shoot me.

That’s what Laura had told the kid who had already murdered two people—shoot me. She had said it repeatedly. Andy’s brain echoed the words each time Laura said them on the video.

Shoot me, I want you to shoot me, shoot me, when you shoot me, my daughter will run—

When the killing spree had first started, every living person in the restaurant had screamed or ducked or run away or all three.

Laura had started counting the number of bullets.

“What?” Gordon mumbled. “What’s he doing?”

Snap.

On the screen, Helsinger was unsnapping the sheath hanging from his gunbelt.

“That’s a knife,” Gordon said. “I thought he used a gun.”

The gun was holstered. The knife was gripped in Helsinger’s fist, blade angled down for maximum carnage.

Andy wanted to close her eyes, but just as badly, she wanted to see it again, to watch her mother’s face, because right now, at this moment on the video when Helsinger was holding the menacing-looking hunting knife, Laura’s expression was almost placid, like a switch inside of her had been turned off.

The knife arced up.

Gordon sucked in air between his teeth.

The knife arced down.

Laura lifted her left hand. The blade sliced straight through the center of her palm. Her fingers wrapped around the handle. She wrenched it from his grasp, then, the knife still embedded in her hand, backhanded the blade into the side of his neck.

Thunk.

Helsinger’s eyes went wide.

Laura’s left hand was pinned to the left side of his neck like a message tacked to a bulletin board.

There was a slight pause, no more than a few milliseconds.

Laura’s mouth moved. One or two words, her lips barely parting.

Then she crossed her right arm underneath her trapped left.

She braced the heel of her right hand near Helsinger’s right shoulder.

Her right hand pushed his shoulder.

Her left hand jerked the knife blade straight out of the front of his throat.

Blood.

Everywhere.

Gordon’s mouth gaped open.

Andy’s tongue turned into cotton.

Right hand pushing, left hand pulling.

From the video, it looked like Laura had willfully pulled the knife out of Helsinger’s throat.

Not just killing him.

Murdering him.

“She just—” Gordon saw it, too. “She—”

His hand went to his mouth.

On the video, Helsinger’s knees hit the floor. His chest. His face.

Andy saw herself in the distance. The whites of her eyes were almost perfect circles.

In the foreground, Laura’s expression remained placid. She looked down at the knife that pierced her hand straight through, turning it to see—first the palm, then the back—as if she had found a splinter.

That’s where Palazzolo chose to pause the video.

She waited a beat, then asked, “Do you want to see it again?”

Gordon swallowed so hard that Andy saw his Adam’s apple bob.

“Mr. Oliver?”

He shook his head, looked down the hallway.

Palazzolo clicked off the screen. She returned the phone to her pocket. Without Andy noticing, she had angled her chair away from Gordon. Palazzolo leaned forward, hands resting on her legs. There was only two inches of space between her knees and Andy’s. She said, “It’s pretty horrific. It must be hard seeing it again.”

Gordon shook his head. He thought the detective was still talking to him.

Palazzolo said, “Take all the time you need, Ms. Oliver. I know this is hard. Right?” She was talking to Andy again, leaning in closer; so close that it was making Andy feel uncomfortable.

One hand pushing, one hand pulling.

Pushing his shoulder. Pulling the knife through his neck.

The calm expression on Laura’s face.

I’ll tell you what I know, and then if Andrea feels like it, she can tell me what she knows.

The detective had not told them anything, or shown them anything, that probably was not already on the news. And now she was crowding Andy without seeming to crowd her, taking up a section of her personal space. Andy knew this was an interview technique because she had read some of the training textbooks during slow times at work.

Horton’s Annotations on the Police Interview: Witness Statements, Hostile Witness Interrogations and Confessions.

You were supposed to make the subject feel uncomfortable without them knowing why they were feeling uncomfortable.

And the reason Palazzolo was trying to make Andy uncomfortable was because she was not taking a statement. She was interrogating her.

Palazzolo said, “You’re lucky your mom was there to save you. Some people would call her a hero.”

Some people.

Palazzolo asked, “What did your mother say to Jonah before he died?”

Andy watched the space between them narrow. Two inches turned into one.

“Ms. Oliver?”

Laura had seemed too calm. That was the problem. She had been too calm and methodical the whole time, especially when she’d raised her right hand and placed it near Jonah’s right shoulder.

One hand pushing, one hand pulling.

Not scared for her life.

Deliberate.

“Ms. Oliver?” Palazzolo repeated. “What did your mother say?”

The detective’s unspoken question filled that tiny inch of uncomfortable space between them: If Laura really was that calm, if she really was that methodical, why hadn’t she used the same hand to take away Helsinger’s gun?

“Andrea?” Palazzolo rested her elbows on her knees. Andy could smell coffee on the detective’s breath. “I know this is a difficult time for you, but we can clear this up really fast if you just tell me what your mom said before Helsinger died.” She waited a beat. “The phone didn’t pick it up. I guess we could send the video to the state lab, but it would be easier if you just told—”

“The father,” Gordon said. “We should pray for the father.”

Palazzolo didn’t look at him, but Andy did. Gordon was not the praying kind.

“I can’t imagine …” he paused. “I can’t imagine what it feels like, to lose your family like that.” He had snapped his fingers together on the last word, but close to his face, as if to wake himself from the trance that the video had put him in. “I’m so glad your mother was there to protect you, Andrea. And herself.”

Andy nodded. For once, she was a few steps ahead of her father.

“Look, guys,” Palazzolo finally sat back in her chair. “I know you’re thinking I’m not on your side, but there are no sides here. Jonah Helsinger was a bad guy. He had a plan. He wanted to murder people, and that’s exactly what he did. And you’re right, Mr. Oliver. Your wife and daughter could’ve been his third and fourth victims. But I’m a cop, and it’s my job to ask questions about what really happened in that diner this afternoon. All I’m after is the truth.”

“Detective Palazzolo.” Gordon finally sounded like himself again. “We’ve both been on this earth long enough to know that the truth is open to interpretation.”

“That’s true, Mr. Oliver. That’s very true.” She looked at Andy. “You know, I’ve just realized that you haven’t said one word this whole time.” Her hand went to Andy’s knee with almost sisterly affection. “It’s all right, honey. Don’t be afraid. You can talk to me.”

Andy stared at the mole on the woman’s jawline because it was too hard to look her in the eye. She wasn’t afraid. She was confused.

Was Jonah Helsinger still a threat when Laura had killed him? Because you could legally kill someone who was threatening you, but if they weren’t threatening you and you killed them, that meant you weren’t defending yourself anymore.

You were just killing them.

Andy tried to think back to this morning, to fill in the blanks with the video. Could Laura have left the knife in Jonah Helsinger’s throat, taken away his gun, and then … what?

The police would’ve come. Dispatch would’ve radioed in an ambulance, not a coroner, because the fact was that, even with a knife sticking Herman Munster-like from the side of his neck, Jonah Helsinger had not been dead. No blood had coughed from his mouth or sneezed from his nose. He had still been capable of moving his arms and legs, which meant his carotid, his jugular, were likely intact. Which meant he had the chance to remain alive until Laura had killed him.

So, what would’ve happened next?

The EMTs could’ve stabilized him for the ride to the hospital and the surgeons could’ve worked to safely remove the knife, but none of that had happened because Laura had braced her right hand near Jonah Helsinger’s right shoulder and ended his life.

“Ms. Oliver,” Palazzolo said. “I find the lack of communication on your part very troubling. If nothing’s wrong, then why aren’t you talking to me?”

Andy made herself look the detective in the eye. She had to speak. This was her time to say that Laura had no other choice. My mother was acting in self-defense. You weren’t there but I was and I will swear on a stack of Bibles in front of any jury that my mother had no other choice but to kill Jonah Lee Helsinger.

“Laura?” Gordon said.

Andy turned, finally breaking out of Palazzolo’s vortex. She had expected to see her mother lying in yet another hospital bed, but Laura was sitting up in a wheelchair.

“I’m all right,” Laura said, but her face was contorted in pain. She was dressed in a white gown. Her arm was strapped to her waist in a Velcro sling. Her fingers were held stiff by something that looked like a biker’s glove with the tips cut off. “I need to change, then I’m ready to go home.”

Gordon opened his mouth to protest, but Laura cut him off.

“Please,” she said. “I’ve already told the doctor I’m going to sign myself out. She’s getting together the paperwork. Can you pull up the car?” She looked annoyed, especially when Gordon didn’t move. “Gordon, can you please pull up your car?”

“Dr. Oliver,” Palazzolo said. “Your surgeon told me you would need to stay overnight, maybe longer.”

Laura didn’t ask the woman who she was or why she was talking to the surgeon. “Gordon, I want to go home.”

“Ma’am,” Palazzolo tried again. “I’m Detective Lisa Palazzolo with the Savannah—”

“I don’t want to talk to you.” She looked up at Gordon. “I want to go home.”

“Ma’am—”

“Are you hard of hearing?” Laura asked. “This man is a lawyer. He can advise you of my legal rights if you’re unfamiliar with them.”

Palazzolo frowned. “Yeah, we’ve already do-si-doed that two-step, but I want to get this straight with you, on the record: you’re refusing to be interviewed?”

“For now,” Gordon intervened, because nothing made him stand more firmly by Laura’s side than to have a stranger challenge her. “My office will call you to schedule an appointment.”

“I could detain her as a material witness.”

“You could,” Gordon agreed. “But then she could stay here under doctor’s orders and you’d be denied access to her anyway.”

Laura tried, “I was under anesthesia. I’m not competent to—”

“You’re making this worse. You realize that, right?” Palazzolo had let the helpful, we’re-on-the-same-team façade drop. She was clearly pissed off. “The only people who are quiet are the ones who have something to hide.”

Gordon said, “My office will be in touch when she’s ready to talk.”

The hinge of Palazzolo’s jaw stuck out like a bolt on the side of her face as she gritted her teeth. She gave a curt nod, then walked off, her jacket swinging as she made her way toward the elevator.

Gordon told Laura, “You should stay in the hospital. She won’t bother you. I’ll get a restraining order if I—”

“Home,” Laura said. “Either get your car or I’ll call a taxi.”

Gordon looked to the orderly behind the wheelchair for help.

The man shrugged. “She’s right, bro. Once she signs that paperwork, we can’t keep her here if she doesn’t wanna stay.”

Gordon knelt down in front of the chair. “Honey, I don’t think—”

“Andrea.” Laura squeezed Andy’s hand so hard that the bones moved. “I don’t want to be here. I can’t be in a hospital again. Not overnight. Do you understand?”

Andy nodded, because that much, at least, she understood. Laura had spent almost a year in and out of the hospital because of complications from her surgery, two bouts of pneumonia and a case of C. difficile that was persistent enough to start shutting down her kidneys.

Andy said, “Dad, she wants to go home.”

Gordon muttered something under his breath. He stood up. He tucked his hand into his pocket. His keys jangled. “You’re sure?” He shook his head, because Laura wasn’t given to making statements she wasn’t sure about. “Get changed. Sign your paperwork. I’ll be out front.”

Andy watched her father leave. She felt a familiar guilt ebb into her chest because she had chosen her mother’s demands over her father’s wishes.

“Thank you.” Laura loosened her grip on Andy’s hand. She asked the orderly, “Could you find a T-shirt or something for me to change into?”

He bowed out with a nod.

“Andrea.” Laura kept her voice low. “Did you say anything to that detective?”

Andy shook her head.

“You were talking to her when I was being wheeled up the hall.”

“I wasn’t—” Andy wondered at her mother’s sharp tone. “She asked questions. I didn’t tell her anything.” Andy added, “I didn’t speak. At all.”

“Okay.” Laura tried to shift in the chair but, judging by the wince on her face, the pain was too much. “What we were discussing before, in the diner. I need you to move out. Tonight. You have to go.”

What?

“I know I said I wasn’t going to give you a deadline, but I am, and it’s now.” Laura tried to shift in the chair again. “You’re an adult, Andrea. You need to start acting like one. I want you to find an apartment and move out. Today.”

Andy felt her stomach go into free fall.

“Your father agrees with me,” Laura said, as if that carried more weight. “I want you out of the house. The garage. Just get out, okay? You can’t sleep there tonight.”

“Mom—”

Laura hissed in air between her teeth as she tried again to find a comfortable position. “Andrea, please don’t argue with me. I need to be alone tonight. And tomorrow, and—you just need to go. I’ve looked after you for thirty-one years. I’ve earned the right to be alone.”

“But—” Andy didn’t know what the but was.

But people are dead.

But you could’ve died.

But you killed somebody when you didn’t have to.

Didn’t you?

Laura said, “My mind is made up. Go downstairs and make sure your father knows the right entrance to pull up to.”

Gordon had picked them up at the hospital before. “Mom—”

“Andrea! Can’t you just for once do something I tell you to do?”

Andy wanted to cover her ears. She had never in her life felt this much coldness from her mother. There was a giant, frozen gulf between them.

Laura’s teeth were clenched. “Go.”

Andy turned on her heel and walked away from her mother. Tears streamed down her face. She had heard that same edge to her mother’s voice twice today, and each time, her body had responded before her mind could shut her down.

Gordon was nowhere in sight, but Detective Palazzolo was waiting for the elevator. The woman opened her mouth to speak. Andy kept walking. She took the stairs. Her feet stumbled over the treads. She was numb. Her head was spinning. Tears rolled like rain.

Move out? Tonight?

As in now? As in forever?

Andy bit her lip so that she would stop crying. She had to keep it together at least until she saw her dad. Gordon would fix this. He would make it better. He would have a plan. He would be able to explain what the hell had happened to her kind, caring mother.

Andy picked up the pace, practically flinging herself down the stairs. The anvil on her chest lifted the tiniest bit. There had to be a reason Laura was acting like this. Stress. Anesthesia. Grief. Fear. Pain. Any one of these things could bring out the worst in a person. All of them wrapped together could make them go crazy.

That was it.

Laura just needed time.

Andy felt her breathing start to calm. She rounded the stairs at the next landing. Her sweaty hand slipped on the railing. One foot hit sideways on the tread, the other foot slipped out from under her and she found herself flat on her ass.

Fuck.

Andy put her head in her hands. Something wet slid down the back of her fingers that was too thick to be sweat.

Fuck!

Her knuckle was bleeding. She put it in her mouth. She could feel her hands trembling. Her brain was spinning inside her head. Something weird was happening with her heartbeat.

Above her, a door opened, then closed, then there were scuffling footsteps on the stairs.

Andy tested her ankle, which, remarkably, was fine. Her knee felt wonky but nothing was sprained or broken. She stood up, ready to head down to the ground floor, but a wave of nausea spun up her throat.

Above her, the footsteps were getting closer.

It was bad enough to vomit in a public place. The only thing worse was having a witness. Andy had to find a bathroom. At the next landing, she pushed open the door and sprinted down another hallway until she found the toilets.

She had to run to make it to the stall in time. She opened her mouth and waited to throw up but now that she was here, squatting in front of the toilet bowl, the only thing that came up was bile.

Andy horked out as much as she could before flushing the toilet. She sat down on the closed lid. She used the back of her hand to wipe her mouth. Sweat dripped down her neck. She was breathing like she’d run a marathon.

“Andrea?”

Fuck.

Her legs retracted like a roller shade, heels hooked onto the edge of the toilet bowl, as if drawing herself into a ball would make her invisible.

“Andrea?” Palazzolo’s chunky police-issue shoes thumped across the tiles. She stopped directly in front of Andy’s stall.

Andy stared at the door. A faucet was dripping. She counted off six drops before—

“Andrea, I know you’re in there.”

Andy rolled her eyes at the stupidity of the situation.

“I gather you don’t like to talk,” Palazzolo said. “So maybe you could just listen?”

Andy waited.

“Your mom might be in a lot of trouble.” Palazzolo waited another beat. “Or not.”

Andy’s heart leapt at the possibility of the not.

“What she did—I get that. She was protecting her daughter. I’ve got a kid. I would do anything for the little guy. He’s my baby.”

Andy bit her bottom lip.

“I can help you with this. Help you both get out of this.”

Andy waited again.

“I’m going to leave my card here on the counter.”

Andy kept waiting.

“You call me, anytime, day or night, and together, you and I can figure out what you need to say to make this problem go away.” She paused. “I’m offering to help your mom, Andrea. That’s all I want to do—help.”

Andy rolled her eyes again. She had learned a long time ago that one of the prices of prolonged silence was people assumed that you were simple-minded or outright stupid.

“But here’s the thing: if you really want to help your mom,” Palazzolo tried. “First you have to tell me the truth. About what happened.”

Andy almost laughed.

“Then we’ll go from there. All right?” Another weighted pause. “Right?”

Right.

“Card’s on the counter, doll. Day or night.”

Andy listened to the drips from the faucet.

One drip … two drips … three … four … five … six …

“You wanna make a gesture, like flush the toilet to let me know you heard me?”

Andy held up her middle finger to the back of the stall door.

“All right,” Palazzolo said. “Well, I’m just going to assume you heard. The thing is, sooner rather than later, okay? We don’t wanna have to drag your mom down to the station, open a formal interview, all that stuff. Especially since she’s been hurt. Right?”

Andy had this flash in her head, the image of herself standing from the toilet, kicking open the stall, and telling the woman to go fuck herself.

Then she realized that the stall door opened in, not out, so she couldn’t really kick it open, so she waited on the toilet, hands wrapped around her legs, head buried between her knees, until the detective went away.

3

Andy waited on the toilet so long that her knee popped when she finally uncurled from her perch. Her hamstrings jangled like ukulele strings. She pulled open the stall door. She walked to the sink. She ignored the detective’s card with its shiny gold shield as she washed her face with cold water. The blood on her knuckle ran fresh. She wrapped a paper towel around her finger, then tentatively opened the bathroom door.

She checked the hallway. No Detective Palazzolo. Andy started to leave, but at the last minute, she grabbed the detective’s card off the counter. She would give it to her father. She would tell him what had happened. The cops were not supposed to question you when you had a lawyer. Anybody who watched Law & Order knew that.

There was a crowd in front of the elevator. Again, no Detective Palazzolo, but Andy used the stairs anyway. She walked carefully this time. Her knuckle had stopped bleeding. She threw the napkin into a trash can outside the stairwell. The air in the hospital’s main waiting room was tinged with chemicals and vomit. Andy hoped that the vomit smell wasn’t coming from her. She looked down at her shirt to check.

“My Lord,” someone muttered. “My good Lord.”

The TV.

A sudden understanding hit Andy like a punch to the face.

Every single person in the waiting room, at least twenty people, was watching the diner video play on CNN.

“Holy crap,” someone else said.

On the television, Laura’s hands were showing five fingers and a thumb for six bullets.

Helsinger was standing in front of her. Cowboy hat. Leather vest. Gun still out.

A banner rolled across the bottom of the TV warning people that they were about to see graphic content.

A woman asked, “What’s he doing?”

Helsinger was drawing his knife from the sheath on his hip.

“What the—”

“Oh, shit!”

The crowd went silent as they watched what came next.

There were gasps, a shocked scream, like they were inside a movie theater instead of a hospital waiting room.

Andy was as transfixed as everyone else. The more she watched it, the more she was able to see it happening outside of herself. Who was that woman on the television? What had Laura become while Andy was cowering against the broken window pane?

Someone joked, “Like some kinda ninja granny.”

“Grambo.”

There was uncomfortable laughter.

Andy couldn’t listen to it. She couldn’t be in this room, in this hospital, in this emotional turmoil where the tether that had always linked her back to her mother had been broken.

She turned around and slammed right into a man who was standing too close behind her.

“Sorry.” He tipped his Alabama baseball cap at her.

Andy wasn’t in the mood for chivalry. She stepped to the left as he stepped to the right. The opposite happened when she stepped to the right.

He laughed.

She glared at him.

“My apologies.” Alabama took off his hat and made a sweeping gesture, indicating that she could pass.

Andy walked so quickly that the sliding doors didn’t have time to fully open. She slapped her hand against the frame.

“Bad day?” Alabama had followed her outside. He stood at a respectful distance, but even that felt too close. “You all right?”

Andy glared at him again. Had he not just seen what was on television? Did he not understand that Andy was the useless girl whose mother had faced down a cold-blooded murderer?

And then turned into a murderer herself?

“Is something wrong, Officer?” Alabama kept smiling at Andy.

She looked down at her police-like uniform. The stupid silver badge that was stitched on like a Girl Scout patch—but with far less meaning, because Girl Scouts had to at least do something for those patches. All Andy did was answer phones and walk terrified people through performing CPR or turning off their car engines after a crash.

Jonah Lee Helsinger had thought that she was a cop.

He had thought that she would kill him. Murder him. In cold blood.

Andy looked down at her own hands. They would not stop shaking. She was going to start crying again. Why did she keep crying?

“Here.” Alabama offered her a handkerchief.

Andy stared at the folded white cloth. She thought Gordon was the only man who still carried a handkerchief.

“Just trying to help a lady in need,” he grinned, still holding out the cloth.

Andy did not take it. For the first time, she really looked at the man. He was tall and fit, probably close to forty. Jeans and sneakers. His white button-down shirt was open at the collar, long sleeves neatly rolled up. He looked like he had forgotten to shave this morning, or maybe that was part of his look.

A thought occurred to her that was so startling she blurted it out. “Are you a reporter?”

He laughed and shook his head. “I make my living the honest way.”

“You’re a cop?” she tried. “Detective?” When he did not immediately answer, she told him, “Please leave me alone.”

“Whoa, porcupine.” He held up both his hands in surrender. “I was just making small talk.”

Andy did not want to talk. She scanned the drive for Gordon’s white BMW.

Where was her father?

Andy took out her cell phone. The home screen was filled with text alerts and missed calls. Mindy Logan. Sarah Ives. Alice Blaedel. Danny Kwon. In the last few hours, the smattering of band, chorus and drama geeks Andy had been friends with in high school had all suddenly remembered her phone number.

She dismissed the notices, then pulled up DAD and texted: hurry.

Alabama finally seemed to realize that she wasn’t open to small talk. He tucked his handkerchief back into his jeans pocket. He walked over to one of the benches and sat down. He pulled out his phone. His thumbs worked across the screen.

Andy glanced behind her, wondering what was taking Laura so long. Then she scanned the front parking area for Gordon. Her father was probably in the parking deck, which meant he would be at least twenty minutes because the woman working the booth had to talk to every single person who handed her a ticket to get out.

All she could do was sit down on a bench three down from Alabama. Every muscle in Andy’s body felt like an overstretched rubber band. Her head throbbed. Her stomach was sour. She checked her phone to see if Gordon had texted back, but he would never look at his phone while he was driving because it was dangerous.

The sliding doors opened. Andy felt relief, then trepidation, upon seeing her mother. The orderly pushed the wheelchair to a stop beside the curb. Laura was wearing a cotton candy pink Belle Isle Medical Center T-shirt that was too big for her slender frame. She was clearly in pain. Her face was the color of notebook paper. Her good hand was wrapped around the arm of the chair in a death grip.

Andy asked, “Didn’t they give you anything?”

Laura said nothing, so the orderly volunteered, “The surgery meds are wearing off. The doc offered her a script but she wouldn’t take it.”

“Mom—” Andy didn’t know what to say. Laura wouldn’t even look at her. “Mother.”

“I’m fine,” Laura insisted, though her teeth were gritted. She asked the orderly, “Do you have a cigarette?”

“You don’t smoke,” Andy said, just as her mother reached for a Marlboro from the pack that the orderly pulled from his shirt pocket.

The man cupped his hand as he flicked the lighter.

Andy stepped away from the smell.

Laura didn’t seem to notice. She took a deep drag, then coughed out white puffs of smoke. She held the cigarette awkwardly, pinched between her thumb and forefinger the way a junkie would.

“I’m all right,” Laura said, her voice a raspy whisper. “I just need some space.”

Andy took her at her word. She stepped farther away, putting distance between herself and her mother. She looked at the parking deck, willing Gordon to hurry. She started to cry again, but quietly. She didn’t know what to do. None of this made any sense.

Laura said, “There are some boxes at your father’s house.”

Andy’s lips trembled. Silence eluded her. She had to have answers. “What did I do wrong?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” Laura smoked the cigarette. “I just need to stop coddling you. You need to learn to stand on your own two feet.”

“By moving in with Dad?” She needed this to make sense. Laura always made sense. “Mom, please—”

Laura took a last hit from the cigarette, then handed it to the orderly to finish. She told Andy, “Pack what you need for the night. Your dad won’t let you stay with him forever. You’ll work out a budget. You’ll see what you can afford. You could move to Atlanta, or even back to New York.” She looked up at Andy from her chair. “You have to go, Andrea. I want to be alone now. I’ve earned the right to be alone.”

“I didn’t …” the words got tangled in Andy’s mouth. “I never—”

“Stop,” Laura said. She had never talked to Andy this way. It was as if she hated her. “Just stop.”

Why?

“Thank God,” Laura muttered as Gordon’s BMW glided to a stop in front of the wheelchair ramp.

“Help me up.” Laura held out her hand for the orderly, but the guy in the Alabama hat was suddenly at her side.

He said, “Happy to be of service, ma’am.”

If Andy hadn’t been watching closely, she would’ve missed the look that flashed across her mother’s face. Panic? Fear? Disgust?

He said, “Up you go.”

“Thank you.” Laura let him lift her to standing.

Gordon came around the car and opened the door. He told Alabama, “I’ve got it from here.”

“No problem, big guy.” Alabama didn’t relinquish his hold. He guided Laura down to the front seat, then gently lifted her legs as she turned to face the front. “Take care, now.”

Gordon said, “Thank you.”

“My pleasure.” Alabama offered Gordon his hand. “I’m sorry for the situation your wife and daughter are in.”

“Uh—yes.” Gordon was too polite to correct him about his marital status, let alone refuse to shake his hand. “Thank you.”

Alabama tipped his hat at Andy as she got into the back of the car. He shut the door before she could slam it in his face.

Gordon got behind the wheel. He sniffed the air with visible distaste. “Have you been smoking?”

“Gordon, just drive.”

He waited for her to look at him. She did not. He put the car in gear. He drove away from the portico, past the entrance to the parking garage, then pulled over and parked the car. He turned to Laura. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“No,” she said. “Not here. Not now.”

He shook his head slowly back and forth.

“Andy doesn’t need to hear this.”

Gordon didn’t seem to care. “The kid’s father was Bobby Helsinger. Did you know that?”

Laura’s lips pursed. Andy could tell she knew.

Gordon said, “He was the sheriff of Bibb County before a bank robber blew off his head with a shotgun. This was six months ago, around the same time the detective says Jonah Helsinger started weaponizing.”

The vest and gunbelt.

Palazzolo had told them that Jonah bought it off Amazon six months ago.

Gordon said, “I looked up the obituary on my phone. Jonah’s got three uncles who are cops, two cousins who are in the military. His mother used to work at the district attorney’s office in Beaufort before she went private. The family’s practically law enforcement royalty.” He waited for Laura to say something. “Did you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

Laura took a sharp breath before speaking. “His family royalty does not negate the fact that he murdered two people.”

“He didn’t just murder them. He planned it. He knew exactly what he was doing. He had maps and—” Gordon shook his head, like he could not believe how stupid she was. “Do you think the family’s going to believe their little boy is a sadistic murderer, or do you think they’re going to say he had some kind of mental problem because his hero daddy was murdered by a bank robber and all of this was a cry for help?”

“They can say what they want.”

“That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes any fucking sense,” Gordon snapped. “The Helsingers are going to say exactly what they want—that yeah, this poor, heart-broken, dead cop’s son deserved to go to prison for what he did, but he didn’t deserve to be viciously murdered.”

“That’s not—”

“They’re going to take you down harder than him, Laura. You did that kid a favor. This is all going to be about what you did, not what he did.”

Laura kept silent.

Andy stopped breathing.

Gordon asked, “Do you know there’s a video?”

Laura did not answer, though she must have seen the TV when the orderly wheeled her through the waiting room.

“That detective showed—” Gordon had to stop to swallow. “The look on your face when you killed him, Laura. The serenity. The everyday-ness. How do you think that’s going to stack up against a mentally troubled, fatherless teenage boy?”

Laura turned her head and looked out the window.

“Do you know what that detective kept asking? Over and over again?”

“The pigs always ask a lot of questions.”

“Stop fucking around, Laura. What did you say before you killed him?” Gordon waited, but she did not respond. “What did you say to Helsinger?”

Laura continued to stare out the window.

“Whatever you said—that’s motivation. That’s the difference between maybe—just maybe—being able to argue justifiable homicide and the death penalty.”

Andy felt her heart stop.

“Laura?” He banged his hand on the steering wheel. “God dammit! Answer me. Answer me or—”

“I am not a fool, Gordon.” Laura’s tone was cold enough to burn. “Why do you think I refused to be interviewed? Why do you think I told Andrea to keep her mouth shut?”

“You want our daughter to lie to a police detective? To perjure herself in court?”

“I want her to do what she always does and keep her mouth shut.” Her tone was quiet but her anger was so palpable that Andy felt like the air was vibrating with rage.

Why wasn’t her mother arguing that Gordon was wrong? Why wasn’t she saying that she didn’t have a choice? That she was saving Andy? That it was self-defense? That she was horrified by what she had done? That she had panicked or just reacted or was terrified and she was sorry—so sorry—that she had killed that troubled kid?

Andy slid her hand into her pocket. The detective’s card was still wet from the bathroom counter.

Palazzolo tried to talk to me again. She wanted me to turn on you. She gave me her card.

Gordon said, “Laura, this is deadly serious.”

She fake-laughed. “That’s an interesting choice of words.”

“Cops protect their own. Don’t you know that? They stick together no matter what. That brotherhood bullshit is not just some urban legend you hear on TV.” Gordon was so angry that his voice broke. “This whole thing will turn into a crusade just by virtue of the kid’s last name.”

Laura inhaled, then slowly shushed it out. “I just—I need a moment, Gordon. All right? I need time alone to think this through.”

“You need a criminal litigator to do the thinking for you.”

“And you need to stop telling me what to do!” She was so furious that she screeched out the words. Laura covered her eyes with her hand. “Has hectoring me ever worked? Has it?” She wasn’t looking for an answer. She turned to Gordon, roaring at him, “This is why I left you! I had to get away from you, to get you out of my life, because you have no idea who I am. You never have and you never will.”

Each word was like a slap across her father’s face.

“Jesus.” Laura grabbed the handle above the door, tried to shift her weight off her injured leg. “Will you drive the fucking car?”

Andy waited for her father to say Laura was welcome to walk home, but he didn’t. He faced forward. He pushed the gear into drive. He glanced over his shoulder before hitting the gas.

The car lurched toward the main road.

Andy didn’t know why, but she found herself turning to look out the back window.

Alabama was still standing under the portico. He tipped his hat one last time.

The look on her mother’s face—panic? Fear? Disgust?

Is something wrong, Officer?

Alabama stood rooted in place as Gordon took a left out of the hospital drive. He was still standing there, head turning to follow their progress, when they drove down the street.

Andy watched him watching the car until he was just a speck in the distance.

I’m sorry for the situation your wife and daughter are in.

How had he known that Gordon was her father?

Andy stood under the shower until the hot water ran out. Manic thoughts kept flitting around inside of her head like a swarm of mosquitos. She could not blink without remembering a stray detail from the diner, from the video, from the police interview, the car.

None of it made sense. Her mother was a fifty-five-year-old speech therapist. She played bridge, for chrissakes. She didn’t kill people and smoke cigarettes and rail against the pigs.

Andy avoided her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she dried her hair. Her skin felt like sandpaper. There were tiny shards of glass embedded in her scalp. Her chapped lips had started bleeding at the corner. Her nerves were still shaky. At least she thought it was her nerves. Maybe it was lack of sleep that was making her feel so jumpy, or the absence of adrenaline, or the desperation she felt every time she replayed the last thing that Laura had said to Andy before she went into the house—

I’m not going to change my mind. You need to leave tonight.

Andy’s heart felt so raw that a feather could’ve splayed it open.

She rummaged through the clean clothes pile and found a pair of lined running shorts and a navy-blue work shirt. She dressed quickly, walking to the window as she did up the buttons. The garage was detached from the house. The apartment was her cave. Gray walls. Gray carpet. Light-blocking shades. The ceiling sloped with the roofline, only made livable by two tiny dormers.

Andy stood at the narrow window and looked down at her mother’s house. She could not hear her parents arguing, but she knew what was happening the same way that you knew you had managed to give yourself food poisoning. She was seized by that awful, clammy feeling that something just wasn’t right.

The death penalty.

Where had her mother even learned to catch a knife like that? Laura had never been in the military. As far as Andy knew, she hadn’t taken any self-defense classes.

Almost every day of her mother’s life for the last three years had been spent either trying not to die from cancer or enduring all the horrible indignities that cancer treatment brought with it. There had not been a hell of a lot of free time to train for hand-to-hand combat. Andy was surprised her mother had been able to raise her arm so quickly. Laura struggled to lift a grocery bag, even with her good hand. The breast cancer had invaded her chest wall. The surgeon had removed part of her pectoral muscle.

Adrenaline.

Maybe that was the answer. There were all kinds of stories about mothers lifting cars off their trapped babies or performing other tremendous physical feats in order to protect their children. Sure, it wasn’t common, but it happened.

But that still didn’t explain the look on Laura’s face when she pulled the knife through. Blank. Almost workman-like. Not panicked. Not afraid. She could’ve just as easily been sitting at her desk reviewing a patient’s chart.

Andy shivered.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The sun would not go down for another hour, but the clouds were dark and heavy with the promise of rain. Andy could hear waves throwing themselves onto the beach. Seagulls hashing out dinner plans. She looked down at her mother’s tidy bungalow. Most of the lights were on. Gordon was pacing back and forth in front of the kitchen window. Her mother was seated at the table, but all that Andy could make out was her hand, the one that wasn’t strapped to her waist, resting on a placemat. Laura’s fingers occasionally tapped, but otherwise she was still.

Andy saw Gordon throw his hands into the air. He walked toward the kitchen door.

Andy stepped back into the shadows. She heard the door slam closed. She chanced another look outside the window.

Gordon walked down the porch stairs. The motion detector flipped on the floodlights. He looked up at them, shielding his eyes with his hand. Instead of heading toward her apartment, he stopped on the bottom riser and sat down. He rested his forehead on the heels of his hands.

Her first thought was that he was crying, but then she realized that he was probably trying to regain his composure so that Andy wouldn’t be even more worried when she saw him.

She had seen Gordon cry once, and only once, before. It was at the beginning of her parents’ divorce. He hadn’t let go and sobbed or anything. What he had done was so much worse. Tears had rolled down his cheeks, one long drip after another, like condensation on the side of a glass. He’d kept sniffing, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He had left for work one morning assuming his fourteen-year marriage was solid, then before lunchtime had been served with divorce papers.

“I don’t understand,” he had told Andy between sniffles. “I just don’t understand.”

Andy couldn’t remember the man who was her real father, and even thinking the words real father felt like a betrayal to Gordon. Sperm donor felt too overtly feminist. Not that Andy wasn’t a feminist, but she didn’t want to be the kind of feminist that men hated.

Her birth father—which sounded strange but kind of made sense because adopted kids said birth mother—was an optometrist whom Laura had met at a Sandals resort. Which was weird, because her mother hated to travel anywhere. Andy thought they’d met in the Bahamas, but she was told the story so long ago that a lot of details were lost.

These were the things she knew: That her birth parents had never married. That Andy was born the first year they were together. That her birth father, Jerry Randall, had died in a car accident while on a trip home to Chicago when Andy was eighteen months old.

Unlike Laura’s parents, who had both died before Andy was born, Andy still had grandparents on her birth father’s side—Laverne and Phil Randall. She had an old photo somewhere of herself, no more than two, sitting in their laps, balanced between each of their knees. There was a painting of the beach on the wood-paneled wall behind them. The couch looked scruffy. They seemed like kind people, and maybe they were in some ways, but they had completely cut off both Laura and Andy when Gordon had entered their lives.

Gordon—of all people. A Phi Beta Sigma who had graduated Georgetown Law while working as a volunteer coordinator at Habitat for Humanity. A man who played golf, loved classical music, was the president of his local wine-tasting society and had chosen for his vocation one of the most boring areas of the law, helping wealthy people figure out how their money would be spent after they died.

That Andy’s birth grandparents had balked at the dorkiest, most uptight black man walking the planet simply because of the color of his skin was enough to make Andy glad she didn’t have any contact with them.

The kitchen door opened. Andy watched Gordon stand up. He tripped the floodlights again. Laura handed him a plate of food. Gordon said something Andy could not hear. Laura slammed the door in lieu of response.

Through the kitchen window, she saw her mother making her way back to the table, gripping the counter, the doorjamb, the back of a chair—anything she could find to take the pressure off of her leg.

Andy could’ve helped her. She could’ve been down there making her mother tea or helping her wash off the hospital smell the way she’d done so many times before.

I’ve earned the right to be alone.

The TV by Andy’s bed caught her attention. The set was small, formerly taking up space on her mother’s kitchen counter. By habit, Andy had turned it on when she walked through the door. The sound was muted. CNN was showing the diner video again.

Andy closed her eyes, because she knew what the video showed.

She breathed in.

Out.

The air-conditioner hummed in her ears. The ceiling fan wah-wahed overhead. She felt cold air curl around her neck and face. She was so tired. Her brain was filled with slow-rolling marbles. She wanted to sleep, but she knew she could not sleep here. She would have to stay at Gordon’s tonight and then, first thing tomorrow morning, her father would require she make some kind of a plan. Gordon always wanted a plan.

A car door opened and closed. Andy knew it was her father because the McMansions along her mother’s street, all of them so huge that they literally blocked out the sun, were always vacant during the most extreme heat of the summer.

She heard scuffling feet across the driveway. Then Gordon’s heavy footsteps were on the metal stairs to the apartment.

Andy grabbed a trashbag out of the box. She was supposed to be packing. She opened the top drawer of her dresser and dumped her underwear into the bag.

“Andrea?” Gordon knocked on the door, then opened it.

He glanced around the room. It was hard to tell whether Andy had been robbed or a tornado had hit. Dirty clothes carpeted the floor. Shoes were piled on top of a flat box that contained two unassembled Ikea shoe racks. The bathroom door hung open. Her period panties from a week ago hung stiffly from the towel rod.

“Here.” Gordon offered the plate that Laura had given him. PB&J, chips and a pickle. “Your mom said to make sure you eat something.”

What else did she say?

“I asked for a bottle of wine, but got this.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pint-sized bottle of Knob Creek. “Did you know your mother keeps bourbon in the house?”

Andy had known about her mother’s stash since she was fourteen.

“Anyway, I thought this might help tamp down some nerves. Take the edge off.” He broke the seal on the top. “What are the chances that you have some clean glasses in this mess?”

Andy put the plate on the floor. She felt underneath the sofa bed and found an open pack of Solo cups.

Gordon scowled. “I guess that’s better than passing the bottle back and forth like a couple of hobos.”

What did Mom say?

He poured two fingers of bourbon into the deep cup. “Eat something before you have a drink. Your stomach’s empty and you’re tired.”

Belle Isle Andy hadn’t had a drink since she’d returned home. She wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to break the streak. Still, she took a cup and sat cross-legged on the floor so that her dad could sit in the chair.

He sniffed at the chair. “Did you get a dog?”

Andy sucked down a mouthful of bourbon. The 100 proof made her eyes water.

He said, “We should toast your birthday.”

She pressed together her lips.

He held up the cup. “To my beautiful daughter.”

Andy held up her drink, too. Then she took another sip.

Gordon didn’t imbibe. He dug into his suit pocket and retrieved a white mailing envelope. “I got you these. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to wrap them in something pretty.”

Andy took the envelope. She already knew what was inside. Gordon always bought her gift cards because he knew the stores she liked, but he had no idea what she liked from those stores. She dumped the contents onto the floor. Two $25 gas cards for the station down the street. Two $25 iTunes cards. Two $25 Target gift cards. One $50 gift card to Dick Blick for art supplies. She picked up a piece of paper. He had printed out a coupon for a free sandwich at Subway when you bought one of equal or lesser value.

He said, “I know you like sandwiches. I thought we could go together. Unless you want to take someone else.”

“These are great, Dad. Thank you.”

He swished around the bourbon but still did not drink. “You should eat.”

Andy bit into the sandwich. She looked up at Gordon. He was touching his mustache again, smoothing it down the same way he stroked Mr. Purrkins’ shoulders.

He said, “I have no idea what’s going through your mother’s mind.”

Andy’s jaw made a grinding noise as she chewed. She might as well have been eating paste and cardboard.

He said, “She told me to let you know that she’s going to pay off your student loans.”

Andy choked on the bite.

“That was my response, too.” Her student loans were a sore point with Gordon. He had offered to refinance the debt in order to help Andy get out from under $800’s worth of interest a month, but for reasons known only to her id, she had passed his deadline for gathering all the paperwork.

He said, “Your mother wants you to move back to New York City. To pursue your dreams. She said she’d help you with the move. Financially, I mean. Suddenly, she’s very free with her money.”

Andy worked peanut butter off the roof of her mouth with her tongue.

“You can stay with me tonight. We’ll work out something tomorrow. A plan. I—I don’t want you going back to New York, sweetheart. You never seemed happy up there. I felt like it took a piece of you; took away some of your Andy-ness.”

Andy’s throat made a gulping sound as she swallowed.

“When you moved back home, you were so good taking care of Mom. So good. But maybe that was asking too much. Maybe I should’ve helped more or … I don’t know. It was a lot for you to take on. A lot of pressure. A lot of stress.” His voice was thick with guilt, like it was his fault that Laura got cancer. “Mom’s right that you need to start your life. To have a career and maybe, I don’t know, maybe one day a family.” He held up his hand to stop her protest. “Okay, I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but whatever the problem is, I just don’t think going back to New York is the answer.”

Gordon’s head turned toward the television. Something had caught his eye. “That’s—from high school. What’s her—”

Motherfucker.

CNN had identified Alice Blaedel, one of Andy’s friends from high school, as a Close Friend of the Family.

Andy found the remote and unmuted the sound.

“—always the cool mom,” Alice, who had not spoken to Andy in over a decade, was telling the reporter. “You could, you know, talk to her about your problems and she’d, like, she wouldn’t judge, you know?” Alice kept shrugging her shoulder every other word, as if she was being electrocuted. “I dunno, it’s weird to watch her on the video because, you’re like, wow, that’s Mrs. Oliver, but it’s like in Kill Bill where the mom is all normal in front of her kid but she’s secretly a killing machine.”

Andy’s mouth was still thick with peanut butter, but she managed to push out the words, “Killing machine?”

Gordon took the remote from Andy. He muted the sound. He stared at Alice Blaedel, whose mouth was still moving despite not knowing a goddamn thing.

Andy poured more bourbon into her empty cup. Alice had walked out on Kill Bill because she’d said it was stupid and now she was using it as a cultural touchstone.

Gordon tried, “I’m sure she’ll regret her choice of words.”

Like she’d regretted getting genital warts from Adam Humphrey.

He tried again. “I didn’t realize you had reconnected with Alice.”

“I haven’t. She’s a self-serving bitch.” Andy swallowed the bourbon in one go. She coughed at the sudden heat in her throat, then poured herself some more.

“Maybe you should—”

“They lift cars,” Andy said, which wasn’t exactly what she meant. “Mothers, I mean. Like, the adrenaline, when they see that their kids are trapped.” She raised her hands to indicate the act of picking up an overturned automobile.

Gordon stroked his mustache with his fingers.

“She was so calm,” Andy said. “In the diner.”

Gordon sat back in the chair.

Andy said, “People were screaming. It was terrifying. I didn’t see him shoot—I didn’t see the first one. The second one, I saw that.” She rubbed her jaw with her hand. “You know that phrase people say in the movies, ‘I’m gonna blow your head off’? That happens. It literally happens.”

Gordon crossed his arms.

“Mom came running toward me.” Andy saw it all happening again in her head. The tiny red dots of blood freckling Laura’s face. Her arms reaching out to tackle Andy to the ground. “She looked scared, Dad. With everything that happened, that’s the only time I ever saw her look scared.”

He waited.

“You watched the video. You saw what I did. Didn’t do. I was panicked. Useless. Is that why …” She struggled to give voice to her fear. “Is that why Mom’s mad at me? Because I was a coward?”

“Absolutely not.” He shook his head, vehement. “There’s no such thing as a coward in that kind of situation.”

Andy wondered if he was right, and more importantly, if her mother agreed with him.

“Andrea—”

“Mom killed him.” Saying the words put a burning lump of coal in her stomach. “She could’ve taken the gun out of his hand. She had time to do that, to reach down, but instead she reached up and—”

Gordon let her speak.

“I mean—did she have time? Is it right to assume she was capable of making rational choices?” Andy did not expect an answer. “She looked calm in the video. Serene, that’s what you said. Or maybe we’re both wrong, because, really, she didn’t have an expression. Nothing, right? You saw her face. Everyday-ness.”

He nodded, but let her continue.

“When it was happening, I didn’t see it from the front. I mean, I was behind her, right? When it was happening. And then I saw the video from the front and it—it looked different.” Andy tried to keep her muddled brain on track. She ate a couple of potato chips, hoping the starch would absorb the alcohol.

She told her father, “I remember when the knife was in Jonah’s neck and he was raising the gun—I remember being really clear that he could’ve shot somebody. Shot me. It doesn’t take much to pull a trigger, right?”

Gordon nodded.

“But from the front—you see Mom’s face, and you wonder if she did the right thing. If she was thinking that, yes, she could take away the gun, but she wasn’t going to do that. She was going to kill the guy. And it wasn’t out of fear or self-preservation but it was like … a conscious choice. Like a killing machine.” Andy couldn’t believe she had used Alice Blaedel’s spiteful words to describe her mother. “I don’t get it, Daddy. Why didn’t Mom talk to the police? Why didn’t she tell them it was self-defense?”

Why was she letting everyone believe that she had deliberately committed murder?

“I don’t get it,” Andy repeated. “I just don’t understand.”

Gordon stroked his mustache again. It was becoming a nervous habit. He didn’t answer her at first. He was used to carefully considering his words. Everything felt especially dangerous right now. Neither one of them wanted to say something that could not be taken back.

Your mother is a murderer. Yes, she had a choice. She chose to kill that boy.

Eventually, Gordon said, “I have no idea how your mother was able to do what she did. Her thought process. The choices she made. Why she behaved the way she did toward the police.” He shrugged, his hands out in the air. “One could hazard that her refusal to talk about it, her anger, is post-traumatic stress, or perhaps it triggered something from her childhood that we don’t know about. She’s never been one to discuss the past.”

He stopped again to gather his thoughts.

“What your mother said in the car—she’s right. I don’t know her. I can’t comprehend her motivations. I mean, yes, I do get that she had the instinct to protect you. I’m very glad that she did. So grateful. But how she did it …” He let his gaze travel back to the television. More talking heads. Someone was pointing to a diagram of the Mall of Belle Isle, explaining the route Jonah Helsinger had taken to the diner. “Andrea, I just don’t know.” Gordon said it again: “I just don’t know.”

Andy had finished her drink. Under her father’s watchful eye, she poured another one.

He said, “That’s a lot of alcohol on an empty stomach.”

Andy shoved the rest of the sandwich into her mouth. She chewed on one side so she could ask, “Did you know that guy at the hospital?”

“Which guy?”

“The one in the Alabama hat who helped Mom into the car.”

He shook his head. “Why?”

“It seemed like Mom knew him. Or maybe was scared of him. Or—” Andy stopped to swallow. “He knew you were my dad, which most people don’t assume.”

Gordon touched the ends of his mustache. He was clearly trying to recall the exchange. “Your mother knows a lot of people in town. She has a lot of friends. Which, hopefully, will help her.”

“You mean legally?”

He did not answer the question. “I put in a call to a criminal defense lawyer I’ve used before. He’s aggressive, but that’s what your mother needs right now.”

Andy sipped the bourbon. Gordon was right: the edge was coming off. She felt her eyes wanting to close.

He said, “When I first met your mom, I thought she was a puzzle. A fascinating, beautiful, complex puzzle. But then I realized that no matter how close I got to her, no matter what combination I tried, she would never really open up to me.” He finally drank some bourbon. Instead of gulping it like Andy, he let it roll down his throat.

He told her, “I’ve said too much. I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s been a troubling day, and I haven’t done much to help the situation.” He indicated a box filled with art supplies. “I assume you want this to go tonight?”

“I’ll get it tomorrow.”

Gordon gave her a careful look. As a kid, she would freak out whenever her art supplies were not close at hand.

Andy said, “I’m too tired to do anything but sleep.” She did not tell him that she had not held a charcoal pencil or a sketch-pad in her hands since her first year in New York. “Daddy, should I talk to her? Not to ask her if I can stay, but to ask her why.”

“I don’t feel equipped to offer you advice.”

Which probably meant she shouldn’t.

“Sweetheart.” Gordon sensed her melancholy. He leaned over and put his hands on her shoulders. “Everything will work itself out. We’ll discuss your future at the end of the month, all right? That gives us eleven days to formulate a plan.”

Andy chewed her lip. Gordon would formulate a plan. Andy would pretend like she had a lot of time to think about it until the tenth day, then she would panic.

He said. “For tonight, we’ll take your toothbrush, your comb, whatever you absolutely need, then we’ll pack everything else tomorrow. And get your car. I assume it’s still at the mall?”

Andy nodded. She had forgotten all about her car. Laura’s Honda was there, too. They were probably both clamped or towed by now.

Gordon stood up. He closed her art supply box and put it on the floor out of the way. “I think your mother just needs some time alone. She used to take her drives, remember?”

Andy remembered.

On weekends, Andy and Gordon would be doing a project, or Gordon would be doing the project and Andy would be nearby reading a book, and suddenly Laura would burst in, keys in her hand, and announce, “I’m going to be gone for the day.”

Oftentimes she would bring back chocolate for Andy or a nice bottle of wine for Gordon. Once, she’d brought a snowglobe from the Tubman Museum in Macon, which was two and a half hours away. Whenever they asked Laura where she had gone and why, she would say, “Oh, you know, just needed to be somewhere besides here.”

Andy looked around the cramped, cluttered room. Suddenly, it felt less like a cave and more like a hovel.

Before Gordon could say it, she told him, “We should go.”

“We should. But I’m leaving this on your mother’s porch.” Gordon pocketed the bourbon. He hesitated, then added, “You know you can always talk to me, sweetie. I just wish you didn’t have to get tipsy to do it.”

“Tipsy.” Andy laughed at the silly-sounding word because the alternative was to cry, and she was sick of crying. “Dad, I think—I think I want some time alone, too.”

“O-kay,” he drew out the word.

“Not, like, forever. I just think maybe it would be good if I walked to your house.” She would need another shower, but something about being enveloped by the sweltering, humid night was appealing. “Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s okay. I’ll tell Mr. Purrkins to warm your bed for you.” Gordon kissed the top of her head, then grabbed the plastic garbage bag she had filled with underwear. “Don’t dawdle too long. The app on my phone says it’s going to start raining in half an hour.”

“No dawdling,” she promised.

He opened the door but did not leave. “Next year will be better, Andrea. Time puts everything into perspective. We’ll get through what happened today. Mom will be herself again. You’ll be standing on your own two feet. Your life will be back on track.”

She held up her crossed fingers.

“It’ll be better,” Gordon repeated. “I promise.”

He closed the door behind him.

Andy heard his heavy footsteps on the metal stairs.

She didn’t believe him.

4

Andy rolled over in bed. She brushed something away from her face. In her sleeping brain, she told herself it was Mr. Purrkins, but her half-awake brain told her that the item was way too malleable to be Gordon’s chubby calico. And that she couldn’t be at her father’s house because she had no recollection of walking there.

She sat up too fast and fell back from dizziness.

An involuntary groan came out of Andy’s mouth. She pressed her fingers into her eyes. She could not tell if she was tipsy from the bourbon or had crossed into legit hungover, but the headache she’d had since the shooting was like a bear’s teeth gnawing at her skull.

The shooting.

It had a name now, an after that calved her life away from the before.

Andy let her hand fall away. She blinked her eyes, willing them to adjust to the darkness. Lowlight from a soundless television. The wah-wah noise of a ceiling fan. She was still in her apartment, splayed out on the pile of clean clothes that she stored on the sofa bed. The last thing she remembered was searching for a clean pair of socks.

Rain pelted the roof. Lightning zigzagged outside the tiny dormer windows.

Crap.

She had dawdled after promising her father that she would not dawdle, and now her choices were to either beg him to pick her up or walk through what sounded like a monsoon.

With great care, she slowly sat back up. The television pulled Andy’s attention. CNN was showing a photo of Laura from two years ago. Bald head covered in a pink scarf. Tired smile on her face. The Breast Cancer Awareness Walk in Charleston. Andy had been cropped out of the image, but her hand was visible on Laura’s shoulder. Someone—maybe a friend, maybe a stranger—had taken that private, candid moment and exploited it for a photo credit.

Laura’s details appeared on one side of the screen, a résumé of sorts:

—55-Year-Old Divorcee.

—One Adult Child.

—Speech Pathologist.

—No Formal Combat Training.

The image changed. The diner video started to play, the ubiquitous scroll warning that some viewers might find it graphic.

They’re going to take you down harder than him, Laura. This is all going to be about what you did, not what he did.

Andy couldn’t bear to watch it again; didn’t really need to because she could blink and see it all happening live in her head. She stumbled out of bed. She found her phone in the bathroom. 1:18 a.m. She’d been asleep for over six hours. Gordon hadn’t texted, which was some kind of miracle. He was probably as wiped out as Andy. Or maybe he thought that Laura and Andy had made amends.

If only.

She tapped on the text icon and selected DAD. Her eyes watered. The light from the screen was like a straight razor. Andy’s brain was still oscillating in her skull. She dashed off an apology in case her father woke up, found her bed empty and freaked: fell asleep almost there don’t worry I’ve got an umbrella.

The part about the umbrella was a lie. Also the part about being almost there. And that he shouldn’t worry, because she could very well get struck by lightning.

Actually, considering how her day had gone, the odds that Andy would be electrocuted seemed enormously high.

She looked out the dormer window. Her mother’s house was dark but for the light in her office window. It seemed very unlikely that Laura was working. During her various illnesses, she had slept in the recliner in the living room. Maybe Laura had accidentally left the light on and couldn’t bring herself to limp across the foyer to turn it off.

Andy turned away from the window. The television pulled her back in. Laura backhanding the knife into Jonah Helsinger’s neck.

Thwack.

Andy had to get out of here.

There was a floor lamp by the chair but the bulb had blown weeks ago. The overhead lights would be like a beacon in the night. Andy used the flashlight app on her phone to search for an old pair of sneakers that could get ruined in the rain and a poncho she’d bought at a convenience store because it seemed like an adult thing to have in case of an emergency.

Which is why she had left it in the glove box of her car, because why would she go out in the rain unless she got caught without an umbrella in her car?

Lightning illuminated every corner of the room.

Crap.

Andy pulled a trashbag from the box. Of course she didn’t have any scissors. She used her teeth to rip out a hole approximately the circumference of her head. She held up the phone to gauge her progress.

The screen flickered, then died.

The last thing Andy saw were the words LO BAT.

She found the charger stuck in an outlet. The cable was in her car. Her car was two and a half miles away parked in front of the Zegna menswear store.

Unless it had already been towed.

“Fuck!” She said the word with heartfelt conviction. She pushed her head through the trashbag hole and stepped outside. Rain slid down her back. Within seconds, her clothes were soaked so that the homemade poncho turned into cling wrap.

Andy kept walking.

The rain had somehow amplified the day’s heat. She felt hot needles stabbing into her face as she turned onto the road. Streetlights did not exist in this part of the city. People bought houses on Belle Isle because they wanted an authentic, old-fashioned, southern coastal town experience. At least as old-fashioned as you could get when the cheapest mansion off the beach ran north of two million dollars.

Nearly three decades ago, Laura had paid $118,000 for her beachside bungalow. The closest grocery store had been the Piggly Wiggly outside of Savannah. The gas station sold live bait and pickled pigs’ feet in large jars by the cash register. Now, Laura’s house was one of only six original bungalows left in Belle Isle. The land itself was worth literally twenty times the house.

A bolt of lightning licked down from the sky. Andy’s arms flew up as if she could stop it. The rain had intensified. Visibility was around five feet. She stopped in the middle of the road. Another flash of lightning stuttered the raindrops. She couldn’t decide whether or not to turn around and wait for a lull in the storm or keep heading toward her father’s.

Standing in the street like an idiot seemed like the worst of her options.

Andy jumped over the curb onto the sidewalk. Her sneakers made a satisfying splash. She made another splash. She picked up her feet and lengthened her strides. Soon, Andy had pushed herself into a light jog. Then she went faster. And faster.

Running was the only thing that Andy ever felt she did well. It was hard to continually throw one foot after the other. Sweating. Heart pounding. Blood racing through your ears. A lot of people couldn’t do it. A lot of people didn’t want to, especially in the summer when there were heat advisories warning people not to go outside because they could literally die.

Andy could hear the rhythmic slap of her sneakers over the shushing rain. She detoured away from the road that led to Gordon’s, not ready to stop. The boardwalk was thirty yards ahead. The beach just beyond. Her eyes started to sting from the salt air. She couldn’t hear the waves, but she somehow absorbed their velocity, the relentless persistence to keep pushing forward no matter how hard gravity pulled at your back.

She took a left onto the boardwalk, fighting an inelegant battle between the wind and the trashbag before she managed to tear off the plastic and slam it into the nearest recycling bin. Her shoes thudded on the wooden planks. Hot rain drilled open her pores. She wasn’t wearing socks. A blister rubbed on her heel. Her shorts were bunched up. Her shirt was glued down. Her hair was like resin. She sucked in a great big gulp of wet air and coughed it back out.

The spray of blood coming from Betsy Barnard’s mouth.

Shelly already dead on the floor.

Laura with the knife in her hand.

Thwack.

Her mother’s face.

Her face.

Andy shook her head. Water flew like a dog sloughing off the sea. Her fingernails were cutting into her palms. She loosened her hands out of the tight fists they’d clawed into. She swiped hair away from her eyes. She imagined her thoughts receding like the low tide. She pulled air into her lungs. She ran harder, legs pumping, tendon and muscle working in tandem to keep her upright during what was nothing more than a series of controlled falls.

Something clicked inside of her head. Andy had never achieved a runner’s high, not even back when she kept to something like a schedule. She just got to a place where her body didn’t hurt so much that she wanted to stop, but her brain was occupied enough by that pain to keep her thoughts floating along the surface rather than diving down into the darkness.

Left foot. Right foot.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Left. Right. Left.

Breathe.

Tension slowly drained from her shoulders. Her jaw unclenched. The bear-teeth headache turned from a gnawing to a more manageable nibble. Andy’s thoughts started to wander. She listened to the rain, watched the drops fall in front of her face. What would it feel like to open her box of art supplies? To take out her pencil and sketchbook? To draw something like a puddle splattering up from her ruined sneakers? Andy visualized lines and light and shadows, the impact of her sneaker inside a puddle, the jerk of her shoestring caught mid-step.

Laura had almost died during her cancer treatments. It wasn’t just the toxic mixture of drugs, but the other problems that treatment brought with it. The infections. The C. difficile. Pneumonia. Double pneumonia. Staph infections. A collapsed lung.

And now they could add to the list: Jonah Helsinger. Detective Palazzolo. Needing Gordon to butt out of her life. Needing space from her only daughter.

They were going to survive Laura’s coldness the same way they had survived the cancer.

Gordon was right about time putting things in perspective. Andy knew all about waiting—for the surgeon to come out, for the films to be read for the biopsy to be cultured for the chemo and the antibiotics and the pain meds and the anti-nausea shot and the clean sheets and the fresh pillows and finally, blissfully, for the cautious smile on the doctor’s face when she had told Laura and Andy that the scan was clear.

All that Andy had to do now was wait for her mother to come back around. Laura would fight her way out of the dark place she was in until eventually, finally, in a month or six months or by Andy’s next birthday, she would be looking back at what had happened yesterday as if through a telescope rather than through a magnifying glass.

The boardwalk ran out sooner than Andy had expected. She jumped back onto the one-way road that skirted the beachfront mansions. The asphalt felt solid beneath her feet. The roar of the sea began to fade behind the giant houses. The shore along this stretch bent around the tip of the Isle. Her mother’s bungalow was another half mile away. Andy hadn’t meant to go back home. She started to turn around but then remembered—

Her bicycle.

Andy saw the bike hanging from the ceiling every time she went into the garage. The trip back to Gordon’s would be faster on two wheels. Considering the lightning, having a set of rubber tires between herself and the asphalt seemed like a good idea.

She slowed down to a jog, then a brisk walk. The intensity of the rain dialed back. Fat water drops slapped against the top of her head, made divots in her skin. Andy slowed her walk when she saw the faint glow of light from Laura’s office. The house was at least fifty yards away, but this time of year, all the McMansions in the vicinity were unoccupied. Belle Isle was mostly a snowbird town, a respite for Northerners during the harsh winter months. The other homeowners were chased away by the August heat.

Andy glanced into Laura’s office window as she walked down the driveway. Empty, at least as far as she could tell. She used the side entrance to the garage. The glass panes rattled in the door as she closed it. The shushing sound of the rain was amplified in the open space. Andy reached for the garage door opener to turn on the light, but caught herself at the last minute because the light only came on when the door rolled up and the rackety sound could wake the dead. Fortunately, the glow from Laura’s office reached through the glass in the side door. Andy had just enough light to squint by.

She walked to the back, leaving a Pig-Pen-like trail of rain puddles in her wake. Her bike hung upside down from two hooks Gordon had screwed into the ceiling. Andy’s shoulders screamed with pain as she tried to lift the Schwinn’s tires from the hooks. Once. Twice. Then the bike was falling and she almost toppled backward trying to turn it right side up before it hit the ground.

Which was why she hadn’t wanted to hang the fucking thing from the ceiling in the first place, Andy would never, ever say to her father.

One of the pedals had scraped her shin. Andy didn’t worry about the trickle of blood. She checked the tread, expecting dry rot, but found the tires were so new they still had the little alveoli poking out of the sides. Andy sensed her father’s handiwork. Over the summer, Gordon had repeatedly suggested they resume their weekend bike rides. It was just like him to make sure everything would be ready on the off-chance that Andy said yes.

She started to lift her leg, but stopped mid-air. There was a distinct, jangly noise from above. Andy cocked her head like a retriever. All she could make out was the white noise of the rain. She was trying to think of a Jacob Marley joke when the jangle happened again. She strained to listen, but there was nothing more than the constant shush of water falling.

Great. She was a proven coward. She literally did not know when to come in out of the rain, and now, apparently, she was paranoid.

Andy shook her head. She had to get moving again. She sat on the bike and wrapped her fingers around the handlebars.

Her heart jumped into her throat.

A man.

Standing outside the door. White. Beady eyes. Dark hoodie clinging to his face.

Andy froze.

He cupped his hands to the glass.

She should scream. She should be quiet. She should look for a weapon. She should walk the bike back. She should hide in the shadows.

The man leaned closer, peering into the garage. He looked left, then right, then straight ahead.

Andy flinched, drawing in her shoulders like she could fold herself into obscurity.

He was staring right at her.

She held her breath. Waited. Trembled. He could see her. She was certain that he could see her.

Slowly, his head turned away, scanning left, then right, again. He took one last look directly at Andy, then disappeared.

She opened her mouth. She drew in a thimbleful of air. She leaned over the handlebars and tried not to throw up.

The man at the hospital—the one in the Alabama hat. Had he followed them home? Had he been lying in wait until he thought the coast was clear?

No. Alabama had been tall and slim. The guy at the garage door, Hoodie, was stocky, muscle-bound, about Andy’s height but three times as wide.

The jangling noise had been Hoodie walking down the metal stairs.

He had checked to make sure the apartment was vacant.

He had checked to make sure the garage was empty.

And now he was probably going to break into her mother’s house.

Andy furiously patted her pockets, even as she realized that her phone was upstairs, dead where she had left it. Laura had gotten rid of the landline last year. The mansions on either side probably didn’t have phones, either. The bike ride back to Gordon’s would take ten minutes at least and by then her mother could be—

Andy’s heart jerked to a stop.

Her bladder wanted to release. Her stomach was filled with thumbtacks. She carefully stepped off the bike. She leaned it against the wall. The rain was a steady snare drum now. All that she could hear over the shush-shush-shush was her teeth chattering.

She made herself walk to the door. She reached out, wrapped her hand around the doorknob. Her fingers felt cold. Was Hoodie waiting on the other side of the door, back pressed to the garage, arms raised with a bat or a gun or just his giant hands that could strangle the life out of her?

Andy tasted vomit in her mouth. The water on her skin felt frozen. She told herself that the man was cutting through to the beach, but nobody cut through to the beach here. Especially in the rain. And lightning.

Andy opened the door. She bent her knees low, then peered out into the driveway. The light was still on in Laura’s office. Andy saw no one—no shadows, no tripped floodlights, no man in a hoodie waiting with a knife beside the garage or looking through the windows to the house.

Her mother could take care of herself. She had taken care of herself. But that was with both hands. Now, one arm was strapped to her waist and Laura could barely walk across the kitchen on her injured leg without grabbing onto the counter for support.

Andy gently closed the garage door. She cupped her hands to the glass, the same as Hoodie. She looked into the dark space. Again, she could see nothing—not her bike, not the shelves of emergency food and water.

Her relief was only slight, because Hoodie had not walked up the driveway when he’d left. He had turned toward the house.

Andy brushed her fingers across her forehead. She was sweating underneath all the rain. Maybe the guy hadn’t gone inside the bungalow. Why would a burglar choose the smallest house on the street, one of the smallest in the entire city? The surrounding mansions were filled with high-end electronics. Every Friday night, dispatch got at least one call from someone who had driven down from Atlanta expecting to enjoy a relaxing weekend and found instead that their TVs were gone.

Hoodie had been upstairs in the apartment. He had looked in the garage.

He hadn’t taken anything. He was looking for something.

Someone.

Andy walked along the side of the house. The motion detector was not working. The floodlights were supposed to trip. She felt glass crunch under her sneaker. Broken lightbulbs? Broken motion detector? She stood on tiptoe, peered through the kitchen window. To the right, the office door was ajar, but just slightly. The narrow opening cast a triangle of white light onto the kitchen floor.

Andy waited for movement, for shadows. There were none. She stepped back. The porch steps were to her left. She could enter the kitchen. She could turn on the lights. She could surprise Hoodie so that he turned around and shot her or stabbed her the same way that Jonah Helsinger had tried to do.

The two things had to be connected. That was the only thing that made sense. This was Belle Isle, not Atlantic City. Guys in hoodies didn’t case bungalows in the pouring rain.

Andy walked to the back of the house. She shivered in the stiff breeze coming off the ocean. She carefully opened the door to the screened porch. The squeak of the hinge was drowned out by the rain. She found the key inside the saucer under the pansies.

Two French doors opened onto her mother’s bedroom. Again, Andy cupped her hand to glass. Unlike the garage, she could see clear to the corners of the room. The nightlight was on in the bathroom. Laura’s bed was made. A book was on the nightstand. The room was empty.

Andy pressed her ear to the glass. She closed her eyes, tried to focus all of her senses on picking up sounds from inside—feet creaking across the floor, her mother’s voice calling for help, glass breaking, a struggle.

All she heard were the rocking chairs swaying in the wind.

Over the weekend, Andy had joined her mother on the porch to watch the sun rise.

“Andrea Eloise.” Laura had smiled over her cup of tea. “Did you know that when you were born, I wanted to name you Heloise, but the nurse misunderstood me and she wrote down ‘Eloise,’ and your father thought it was so beautiful that I didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d spelled it wrong?”

Yes, Andy knew. She had heard the story before. Every year, on or around her birthday, her mother contrived a reason to tell her that the H had been dropped.

Andy listened at the glass for another moment before forcing herself to move. Her fingers felt so thick she could barely slide the key into the lock. Tears filled her eyes. She was so scared. She had never been this terrified. Not even at the diner, because during the shooting spree, there was no time to think. Andy was reacting, not contemplating. Now, she had plenty of time to consider her actions and the scenarios reeling through her mind were all horrifying.

Hoodie could injure her mother—again. He could be inside, waiting for Andy. He could be killing Laura right now. He could rape Andy. He could kill her in front of her mother. He could rape them both and make one watch or he could kill them then rape them or—

Andy’s knees nearly buckled as she walked into the bedroom. She pulled the door closed, cringing when the latch clicked. Rainwater puddled onto the carpet. She slipped out of her sneakers. Pushed back her wet hair.

She listened.

There was a murmuring sound from the other side of the house.

Conversational. Not threatening, or screaming, or begging for help. More like Andy used to hear from her parents after she went to bed.

“Diana Krall’s going to be at the Fox next weekend.”

“Oh, Gordon, you know jazz makes me nervous.”

Andy felt her eyelids flutter like she was going to pass out. Everything was shaking. Inside her head, the sound of her heartbeat was like a gymnasium full of bouncing basketballs. She had to press her palm to the back of her leg to make herself walk.

The house was basically a square with a hallway that horseshoed around the interior. Laura’s office was where the dining room had been, off the front of the kitchen. Andy walked up the opposite side of the hallway. She passed her old bedroom, now a guest room, ignored all of the family photos and school drawings hanging on the walls.

“—do anything,” Laura said, her tone firm and clear.

Andy stood in the living room. Only the foyer separated her from Laura’s office. The pocket doors had been pulled wide open. The layout of the room was as familiar to Andy as her garage apartment. Couch, chair, glass coffee table with a bowl of potpourri, desk, desk chair, bookcase, filing cabinet, reproduction of the Birth of Venus on the wall beside two framed pages taken from a textbook called Physiology and Anatomy for Speech-Language Pathology.

A framed snapshot of Andy on the desk. A bright green leather blotter. A single pen. A laptop computer.

“Well?” Laura said.

Her mother was sitting on the couch. Andy could see part of her chin, the tip of her nose, her legs uncrossed, one hand resting on her thigh while the other was strapped to her waist. Laura’s face was tilted slightly upward, looking at the person sitting in the leather chair.

Hoodie.

His jeans were soaked. A puddle spread out on the rug at his feet.

He said, “Let’s think about our options here.” His voice was deep. Andy could feel his words rattle inside her chest. “I could talk to Paula Koontz.”

Laura was silent, then said, “I hear she’s in Seattle.”

“Austin.” He waited a moment. “But good try.”

There was silence, long and protracted.

Then Laura said, “Hurting me won’t get you what you need.”

“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to scare the shit out of you.”

Andy felt her eyelids start to flutter again. It was the way he said it—with conviction, almost with glee.

“Is that so?” Laura forced out a fake-sounding laugh. “You think I can be scared?”

“Depends on how much you love your daughter.”

Suddenly, Andy was standing in the middle of her old bedroom. Teeth chattering. Eyes weeping. She couldn’t remember how she had gotten there. Her breath was huffing out of her lungs. Her heart had stopped beating, or maybe it was beating so fast that she couldn’t feel it anymore.

Her mother’s phone would be in the kitchen. She always left it to charge overnight.

Leave the house. Run for help. Don’t put yourself in danger.

Andy’s legs were shaky as she walked down the hall toward the back of the house. Involuntarily, her hand reached out, grabbed onto the doorjamb to Laura’s bedroom, but Andy compelled herself to continue toward the kitchen.

Laura’s phone was at the end of the counter, the section that was closest to her office, the part that was catching a triangle of light from the partially open door.

They had stopped talking. Why had they stopped talking?

Depends on how much you love your daughter.

Andy swung around, expecting to see Hoodie, finding nothing but the open doorway to her mother’s bedroom.

She could run. She could justify leaving because her mother would want her to leave, to be safe, to get away. That’s all Laura had wanted in the diner. That’s all that she would want now.

Andy turned back toward the kitchen. She was inside of her body but somehow outside of it at the same time. She saw herself walking toward the phone at the end of the counter. The cold tile cupped her bare feet. Water was on the floor by the side entrance, probably from Hoodie. Andy’s vision tunneled on her mother’s cell phone. She gritted her teeth to keep them from clicking. If Hoodie was still sitting in the chair, all that separated him from Andy was three feet and a thin wooden door. She reached for the phone. Gently pulled out the charging cord. Slowly walked backward into the shadows.

“Tell me,” Hoodie said, his voice carrying into the kitchen. “Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re being buried alive?” He waited. “Like you’re suffocating?”

Andy’s mouth was spitless. The pneumonia. The collapsed lung. The horrible wheezing sounds. The panicked attempts to breathe. Her mother had been terrified of suffocating. She was so obsessed with the fear of choking to death on the fluids from her lungs that the doctors had to give her Valium to make her sleep.

Hoodie said, “What I’m going to do is, I’m going to put this bag over your head for twenty seconds. You’re going to feel like you’re dying, but you’re not.” He added, “Yet.”

Andy’s finger trembled as she pressed the home button on her mother’s phone. Both of their fingerprints were stored. Touching the button was supposed to unlock the screen, but nothing happened.

Hoodie said, “It’s like dry waterboarding. Very effective.”

“Please …” Laura choked on the word. “You don’t have to do this.”

Andy wiped her finger on the wall, trying to dry it.

“Stop!” her mother shouted so loudly that Andy almost dropped the phone. “Just listen to me. Just for a moment. Just listen to me.”

Andy pressed home again.

Hoodie said, “I’m listening.”

The screen unlocked.

“You don’t have to do this. We can work something out. I have money.”

“Money’s not what I want from you.”

“You’ll never get it out of me. What you’re looking for. I’ll never—”

“We’ll see.”

Andy tapped the text icon. Belle Isle dispatch had adopted the Text-to-911 system six months ago. The alerts flashed at the top of their monitors.

“Twenty seconds,” the man said. “You want me to count them for you?”

Andy’s fingers worked furiously across the keyboard:

419 Seaborne Ave armed man imminent danger pls hurry

“The street’s deserted,” Hoodie said. “You can scream as loud as you need to.”

Andy tapped the arrow to send.

“Stop—” Laura’s voice rose in panic. “Please.” She had started to cry. Her sobs were muffled like she was holding something to her mouth. “Please,” she begged. “Oh, God, plea—”

Silence.

Andy strained to hear.

Nothing.

Not a cry or a gasp or even more pleading.

The quiet was deafening.

“One,” Hoodie counted. “Two.” He paused. “Three.”

Clank. The heavy glass on the coffee table. Her mother was obviously kicking. Something thumped onto the carpet. Laura only had one hand free. She could barely lift a shopping bag.

“Four,” Hoodie said. “Try not to wet yourself.”

Andy opened her mouth wide, as if she could breathe for her mother.

“Five.” Hoodie was clearly enjoying this. “Six. Almost halfway there.”

Andy heard a desperate, high-pitched wheezing, the exact same sound her mother had made in the hospital when the pneumonia had collapsed her lung.

She grabbed the first heavy object she could find. The cast iron frying pan made a loud screech as she lifted it off the stove. There was no chance of surprising Hoodie now, no going back. Andy kicked open the door. Hoodie was standing over Laura. His hands were wrapped around her neck. He wasn’t choking her. His fingers were sealing the clear plastic bag that encased her mother’s head.

Hoodie turned, startled.

Andy swung the frying pan like a bat.

In the cartoons, the flat bottom of the pan always hit the coyote’s head like the clapper on a bell, rendering him stunned.

In real life, Andy had the pan turned sideways. The cast iron edge wedged into the man’s skull with a nauseatingly loud crack.

Not a ringing, but like the sound a tree limb makes when it breaks off.

The reverberations were so strong that Andy couldn’t hold onto the handle.

The frying pan banged to the floor.

At first, Hoodie didn’t respond. He didn’t fall. He didn’t rage. He didn’t strike out. He just looked at Andy, seemingly confused.

She looked back.

Blood slowly flushed into the white of his left eye, moving through the capillaries like smoke, curling around the cornea. His lips moved wordlessly. His hand was steady as he reached up to touch his head. The temple was crushed at a sharp angle, a perfect match to the edge of the frying pan. He looked at his fingers.

No blood.

Andy’s hand went to her throat. She felt like she had swallowed glass.

Was he okay? Was he going to be okay? Enough to hurt her? Enough to suffocate her mother? To rape them? To kill them both? To—

A trilling noise came from his throat. His mouth fell open. His eyes started to roll up. He reached for the chair, knees bent, trying to sit down, but he missed and fell to the floor.

Andy jumped back like she might get scalded.

He had fallen on his side, legs twisted, hands clutching his stomach.

Andy could not stop staring, waiting, trembling, panicking.

Laura said, “Andrea.”

Andy’s heart flickered like a candle. Her muscles were stone. She was fixed in position, cast like a statue.

Laura screamed, “Andrea!”

Andy was jolted out of her trance. She blinked. She looked at her mother.

Laura was trying to lean up on the couch. The whites of her eyes were dotted with broken blood vessels. Her lips were blue. More broken blood vessels pinpricked her cheeks. The plastic bag was still tied around her neck. Deep gouge marks ringed her skin. She had clawed the bag open with her fingers the same way Andy had chewed through the poncho trashbag.

“Hurry.” Laura’s voice was hoarse. “See if he’s breathing.”

Andy’s vision telescoped. She felt dizzy. She heard a whistling sound as she tried to draw air into her lungs. She was starting to hyperventilate.

“Andrea,” Laura said. “He has my gun in the waist of his jeans. Give it to me. Before he wakes up.”

What?

“Andrea, snap out of it.” Laura slid off the couch onto the floor. Her leg was bleeding again. She used her good arm to edge across the carpet. “We need to get the gun. Before he comes round.”

Hoodie’s hands moved.

“Mom!” Andy fell back against the wall. “Mom!”

Laura said, “It’s okay, he’s—”

Hoodie gave a sudden, violent jerk that knocked over the leather chair. His hands started moving in circles, then the circles turned into tremors that quaked into his shoulders, then head. His torso. His legs. Within seconds, his entire body convulsed into a full-blown seizure.

Andy heard a wail come out of her mouth. He was dying. He was going to die.

“Andrea,” Laura said, calm, controlled. “Go into the kitchen.”

“Mom!” Andy cried. The man’s back arched into a half-circle. His feet kicked into the air. What had she done? What had she done?

“Andrea,” Laura repeated. “Go into the kitchen.”

He started to make a grunting noise. Andy covered her ears, but nothing could block the sound. She watched in horror as his fingers curved away from his hands. His mouth foamed. His eyes rolled wildly.

“Go into the—”

“He’s dying!” Andy wailed.

The grunting intensified. His eyes had rolled up so far in his head that it looked like cotton had been stuffed into the sockets. Urine spread out from the crotch of his jeans. His shoe flew off. His hands scratched at the air.

“Do something!” Andy screamed. “Mom!”

Laura grabbed the frying pan. She lifted it over her head.

“No!” Andy leapt across the room. She wrenched the frying pan away from her mother. Laura’s arm snaked around her waist before Andy could get away. She pulled her close, pressed her mouth to Andy’s head. “Don’t look, baby. Don’t look.”

“What did I do?” Andy keened. “What did I do?”

“You saved me,” Laura said. “You saved me.”

“I d-d-d …” Andy couldn’t get out the words. “Mom … he’s … I c-can’t …”

“Don’t look.” Laura tried to cover Andy’s eyes, but she pushed her mother’s hand away.

There was total silence.

Even the rain had stopped tapping against the window.

Hoodie had gone still. The muscles in his face were relaxed. One eye stared up at the ceiling. The other looked toward the window. His pupils were solid black dimes.

Andy felt her heart tumble back down her throat.

The waist of the man’s hoodie had slipped up. Above the white waistband of his underwear, Andy could see a tattoo of a smiling dolphin. It was cresting out of the water. The word Maria was written in an ornate script underneath.

“Is he—” Andy couldn’t say the words. “Mom, is he—”

Laura did not equivocate. “He’s dead.”

“I k-k-k …” Andy couldn’t get the word out. “K-kill … k-kill—”

“Andy?” Laura’s tone had changed. “Do you hear sirens?” She turned to look out the window. “Did you call the police?”

Andy could only stare at the tattoo. Was Maria his girlfriend? His wife? Had she killed someone’s dad?

“Andy?” Laura pushed herself back along the carpet. She reached under the couch with her hand. She was searching for something. “Darling, quickly. Get his wallet out of his pants.”

Andy stared at her mother.

“Get his wallet. Now.”

Andy did not move.

“Look under the couch, then. Come here. Now.” Laura snapped her fingers. “Andy, come here. Do as I say.”

Andy crawled toward the couch, not sure what she was supposed to do.

“Back corner,” Laura told her. “Inside the batting on top of the spring. Reach up. There’s a make-up bag.”

Andy leaned down on her elbow so she could reach into the innards of the couch. She found a vinyl make-up bag, black with a brass zipper. It was heavy, packed tight.

How had it gotten here?

“Listen to me.” Laura had the man’s wallet. She pulled out the cash. “Take this. All of it. There’s a town called Carrollton in West Georgia. It’s on the state line. Are you listening to me?”

Andy had unzipped the bag. Inside was a flip phone with a charging cable, a thick stack of twenty-dollar bills, and a white, unlabeled keycard like you’d use to get into a hotel room.

“Andy,” Laura was reaching for the framed photo on her desk. “You want the Get-Em-Go storage facility. Can you remember? G-e-t-e-m-g-o.”

What?

“Take his wallet. Throw it in the bay.”

Andy looked down at the leather wallet that her mother had tossed onto the floor. The driver’s license showed through a plastic sleeve. Her eyes were so swollen from crying that she couldn’t see the words.

Laura said, “Don’t use the credit cards, all right? Just use the cash. Close your eyes.” She broke the picture frame against the side of her desk. Glass splintered. She picked away the photo. There was a small key inside, the kind you’d use to open a padlock. “You’ll need this, okay? Andy, are you listening? Take this. Take it.”

Andy took the key. She dropped it into the open bag.

“This, too.” Laura wedged the wallet into the make-up bag alongside the cash. “Unit one-twenty. That’s what you need to remember: One-twenty. Get-Em-Go in Carrollton.” She searched the man’s pockets, found his keys. “This is for a Ford. He probably parked in the cul-de-sac at the end of Beachview. Take it.”

Andy took the keys, but her mind would not register what she was holding.

“Unit one-twenty. There’s a car inside. Take that one, leave his Ford. Unhook the battery cables. That’s very important, Andy. You need to cut the power to the GPS. Can you remember that, baby? Unhook the battery cables. Dad showed you what the battery looks like. Remember?”

Andy slowly nodded. She remembered Gordon showing her the parts of a car.

“The unit number is your birthday. One-twenty. Say it.”

“One-twenty,” Andy managed.

“The sirens are getting closer. You have to leave,” Laura said. “I need you to leave. Now.”

Andy was incapacitated. It was too much. Way too much.

“Darling.” Laura cupped Andy’s chin with her hand. “Listen to me. I need you to run. Now. Go out the back. Find the man’s Ford. If you can’t find it, then take Daddy’s car. I’ll explain it to him later. I need you to head northwest. Okay?” She gripped Andy’s shoulder as she struggled to stand. “Andy, please. Are you listening?”

“Northwest,” Andy whispered.

“Try to make it to Macon first, then buy a map, an actual paper map, and find Carrollton. Get-Em-Go is near the Walmart.” Laura pulled Andy up by the arm. “You need to leave your phone here. Don’t take anything with you.” She shook Andy again. “Listen to me. Don’t call Daddy. Don’t make him lie for you.”

“Lie for—”

“They’re going to arrest me for this.” She put her finger to Andy’s lips to stop her protest. “It’s okay, darling. I’ll be okay. But you have to leave. You can’t let Daddy know where you are. Do you understand? If you contact him, they’ll know. They’ll trace it back and find you. Telephone calls, email, anything. Don’t reach out to him. Don’t try to call me. Don’t call any of your friends, or anyone you’ve ever had contact with, okay? Do you understand me? Do you hear what I’m saying?”

Andy nodded because that’s what her mother wanted her to do.

“Keep heading northwest after Carrollton.” Laura walked her through the kitchen, her arm tight around Andy’s waist. “Somewhere far away, like Idaho. When it’s safe, I’ll call you on the phone that’s in the bag.”

Safe?

“You’re so strong, Andrea. Stronger than you know.” Laura was breathing hard. She was clearly trying not to cry. “I’ll call you on that phone. Don’t come home until you hear from me, okay? Only respond to my voice, my actual voice, saying these exact words: ‘It’s safe to come home.’ Do you understand? Andy?”

The sirens were getting closer. Andy could hear them now. At least three cruisers. There was a dead man in the house. Andy had killed him. She had murdered a man and the cops were almost here.

“Andrea?”

“Okay,” Andy breathed. “Okay.”

“Get-Em-Go. One-twenty. Right?”

Andy nodded.

“Out the back. You need to run.” Laura tried to push her toward the door.

“Mom.” Andy couldn’t leave without knowing. “Are you—are you a spy?”

“A what?” Laura looked bewildered.

“Or an assassin, or government agent, or—”

“Oh, Andy, no,” Laura sounded as if she wanted to laugh. “I’m your mother. All I’ve ever been is your mother.” She pressed her palm to the side of Andy’s face. “I’m so proud of you, my angel. The last thirty-one years have been a gift. You are the reason I am alive. I would’ve never made it without you. Do you understand me? You are my heart. You are every ounce of blood in my body.”

The sirens were close, maybe two streets over.

“I’m so sorry.” Laura could no longer hold back her tears. Yesterday, she had killed a man. She had been stabbed, cut, almost suffocated. She had pushed away her family and not a tear had dropped from her eyes until this moment. “My angel. Please forgive me. Everything I’ve ever done is for you, my Andrea Heloise. Everything.”

The sirens were out front. Tires screeched against pavement.

“Run,” Laura begged. “Andy, please, my darling, please—run.”

5

Wet sand caked into the insides of Andy’s sneakers as she ran along the shore. She had the make-up bag clutched to her chest, fingers holding together the top because she dared not take the time to zip it. There was no moon, no light from the McMansions, nothing but mist in her face and the sounds of sirens at her back.

She looked over her shoulder. Flashlights were skipping around the outside of her mother’s house. Shouting traveled down the beach.

“Clear on the left!”

“Clear in the back!”

Sometimes, when Andy stayed on a 911 call, she would hear the cops in the background saying those same words.

“It’s okay to hang up now,” she would tell the caller. “The police will take care of you.”

Laura wouldn’t tell the cops anything. She would probably be sitting at the kitchen table, mouth firmly closed, when they found her. Detective Palazzolo wouldn’t be making any deals after tonight. Laura would be arrested. She would go to jail. She would appear in front of a judge and jury. She would go to prison.

Andy ran harder, like she could get away from the thought of her mother behind bars. She bit her lip until she tasted the metallic tang of blood. The wet sand had turned into concrete inside her shoe. There was a tiny bit of karmic retribution about the pain.

Hoodie was dead. She had killed him. She had murdered a man. Andy was a murderer.

She shook her head so hard that her neck popped. She tried to get her bearings. Seaborne extended three tenths of a mile before it dead-ended into Beachview. If she missed the turn-off, she would find herself in a more inhabited area of the Isle where someone might glance out the window and call the police.

Andy tried to count her footsteps, pacing off two hundred yards, then three hundred, then finally veering left away from the ocean. All of the McMansions had security gates to keep strangers from wandering in off the beach. City code forbade any permanent fences in front of the sand dunes, so people had erected flimsy wooden slats hanging from barbed wire to serve as a deterrent. Only some of the gates were alarmed, but all of them were marked with warnings that a siren would go off if they were opened.

Andy stopped at the first gate she came to. She ran her hand along the sides. Her fingers brushed against a plastic box with a wire coming out of it.

Alarmed.

She ran to the next gate and went through the same check.

Alarmed.

Andy cursed, knowing the fastest way to the street would be to climb over the dunes. She gingerly pushed the wooden slats with her foot. The wire bowed. Some unseen anchor slipped from the sand so that the fence fell low enough to step over. She lifted her leg, careful not to snag her shorts on the barbed wire. Sea oats crushed under her feet as she traversed the steep slope. She cringed at the destruction she was causing. By the time she made it to a stone path, she was limping.

Andy leaned her hand against the wall, stopped to take a breath. Her throat was so dry that she went into a coughing attack. She covered her mouth, waiting it out. Her eyes watered. Her lungs ached. When the coughing had finally passed, she let her hand drop. She took a step that might as well have been on glass. The sand in her sneakers had the consistency of clumping cat litter. Andy took them off, tried to shake them out. The synthetic mesh had turned into a cheese grater. Still, she tried to cram her feet back into the sneakers. The pain was too much. She was already bleeding.

Andy walked barefoot up the path. She thought about all of the clues that Detective Palazzolo would find when she arrived at the bungalow: Laura’s face, especially her bloodshot eyes, still showing signs of suffocation. The plastic bag around her neck with the dead man’s fingerprints on it. The dead man lying in the office by the overturned coffee table. The side of his head caved in. Urine soaking his pants. Foam drying on his lips. His eyes pointing in two different directions. Blood from Laura’s leg streaked across the carpet. Andy’s fingerprints on the handle of the frying pan.

In the driveway: broken glass from the floodlights. The lock on the kitchen door probably jimmied. The puddles on the kitchen tiles showing the path Hoodie had taken. More water showing Andy’s route from the bedroom to the hall to the guest room to the living room and back again.

On the beach: Andy’s footprints carved into the wet sand. Her destructive path up the dunes. Her blood, her DNA, on the stone path where she now stood.

Andy clamped her teeth closed and groaned into the sky. Her neck strained from the effort. She leaned over, elbows on her knees, bowed over by the impact of her horrible actions. None of this was right. Nothing made sense.

What was she supposed to do?

What could she do?

She needed to talk to her father.

Andy started to walk toward the road. She would go to Gordon’s house. She would ask him what to do. He would help her do the right thing.

Andy stopped walking.

She knew what her father would do. Gordon would let Laura take the blame. He would not allow Andy to turn herself in. He would not risk the possibility that she could go to prison for the rest of her life.

But then Palazzolo would find Andy’s wet footprints inside Laura’s house, more footprints in the sand, her DNA between the McMansions, and she would charge Gordon with lying to a police officer and accomplice to murder after the fact.

Her father could go to prison. He could lose his license to practice.

Don’t make him lie for you.

Andy remembered the tears in her mother’s eyes, her insistence that everything she’d done was for Andy. At a basic level, Andy had to trust that Laura was telling her to do the right thing. She continued up the driveway. Laura had guessed that the man’s Ford would be in the Beachview Drive cul-de-sac. She had also said to run, so Andy started to run again, holding her sneakers in one hand and the make-up bag in the other.

She was rounding the corner when a bright light hit her face. Andy ducked back onto the stone path. Her first thought was that a police cruiser had hit her with the spotlight. Then she chanced a look up and realized she had triggered the motion detector on the floodlights.

Andy ran up the driveway. She kept to the middle of the street away from the motion detectors on the houses. She did not look back, but her peripheral vision had caught the distant rolling of the red and blue lights. It looked like every Belle Isle police cruiser had responded to the emergency text. Andy probably had minutes, possibly seconds, before someone in charge told them to fan out and search the area.

She got to the end of the one-way street. Beachview Drive dead-ended into Seaborne Avenue. There was a little dog-leg at the other end that served as beach access for emergency vehicles. Laura had guessed that the dead man’s car would be there.

There was no Ford in sight.

Shit.

A pair of headlights approached from Beachview. Andy panicked, running left, then right, then circling back and diving behind a palm tree as a black Suburban drove by. There was a giant, springy antenna on the bumper that told Andy the car belonged to law enforcement.

Andy looked back up Beachview Drive. There was an unpaved driveway halfway up, weeds and bushes overgrown at the entrance. One of the six remaining bungalows on Belle Isle was owned by the Hazeltons, a Pennsylvania couple who’d stopped coming down years ago.

Andy could hide there, try to figure out what to do next.

She checked Seaborne in case any cars were driving up the wrong way. She scanned Beachview for headlights. Then she jogged up the road, her bare feet slapping the asphalt, until she reached the Hazeltons’ long, sandy driveway.

There was something off.

The overgrown tangle of bushes had been tamped down.

Someone had recently driven up to the house.

Andy skirted the bushes, heading into the yard instead of down the driveway. Her feet were bleeding so badly that the sand created a second layer of sole. She kept moving forward, crouching down to make herself less visible. No lights were on inside the Hazelton house. Andy realized she could sort of see in the darkness. It was later—or earlier—than she’d thought. Not exactly sunrise, but Andy recalled there was a sciencey explanation about how the rays bounced against the ocean surface and brought the light to the beach before you could see the sun.

Whatever the phenomenon, it allowed her to make out the Ford truck parked in the driveway. The tires were bigger than normal. Black bumpers. Tinted windows. Florida license plate.

There was another truck parked beside it—smaller; a white Chevy, probably ten years old but otherwise nondescript. The license plate was from South Carolina, which wasn’t unusual this close to Charleston, but as far as Andy knew, the Hazeltons were still based in Pennsylvania.

Andy carefully approached the Chevy, crouching to look inside. The windows were rolled down. She saw the key was in the ignition. There was a giant lucky rabbit’s foot dangling from the keychain. Fuzzy dice hung from the mirror. Andy had no idea whether or not the truck belonged to the Hazeltons, but leaving the keys inside seemed like something the older couple would do. And the dice and giant rabbit’s foot keychain was right up their grandson’s alley.

Andy considered her options.

No GPS in the Chevy. No one to report it stolen. Should she take this instead? Should she leave the dead man’s truck behind?

Andy let Laura do the thinking for her. Her mother had said to take the dead man’s truck so she was going to take the dead man’s truck.

Andy approached the Ford cautiously. The dark windows were rolled tight. The doors were locked. She found Hoodie’s keys in the make-up bag. The ring had a can opener and the Ford key. No house keys, but maybe they were inside the truck.

Instead of pressing the remote, Andy used the actual key to unlock the door. Inside, she smelled a musky cologne mingled with leather. She tossed the make-up bag onto the passenger’s seat. She had to brace her hands on the sides of the cab to pull herself up into the driver’s seat.

The door gave a solid thunk when she closed it.

Andy stuck the key into the ignition. She turned it slowly, like the truck would blow up or self-destruct with the wrong move. The engine gave a deep purr. She put her hand on the gear. She stopped, because something was wrong.

There should have been light coming from the dash, but there was nothing. Andy pressed her fingers to the console. Construction paper, or something that felt like it, was taped over the display. She turned her head. The dome light had not come on, either.

Andy thought about Hoodie sitting in the truck blacking out all the light then parking it at the Hazeltons.

And then she thought about the light in her mother’s office. The only light Laura had left on in the house. Andy had assumed her mother had forgotten to turn it off, but maybe Laura had not been sleeping in the recliner. Maybe she had been sitting on the couch in her office waiting for someone like Hoodie to break in.

He has my gun in the waistband of his jeans.

Not a gun, but my gun.

Andy felt her mouth go dry.

When had her mother bought a gun?

A siren whooped behind her. Andy cringed, but the cruiser rolled past rather than turning down the driveway. She moved the gear around, slowly letting her foot off the brake, testing each notch until she found reverse.

There was no seeing out the dark windows as she backed out of the driveway. Tree limbs and thorny bushes scraped at the truck. She hit Beachview Drive sideways, the truck wheels bumping off the hard edge of the curb.

Andy performed the same trick with the gear until she found drive. The headlights were off. In the pre-dawn darkness, she had no way of finding the dial to turn them on. She kept both hands tight on the wheel. Her shoulders were up around her ears. She felt like she was about to roll off a cliff.

She drove past the road to Gordon’s house. The flashing lights of a police cruiser were at the end of his street. Andy accelerated before she could be seen. And then she realized that she could not be seen because all of the lights were off, not just the interior lights and the headlights. She glanced into the rearview mirror as she tapped the brakes. The taillights did not come on, either.

This was not good.

It was one thing to cover all of your lights when you were on the way to doing something bad, but when you were leaving the bad thing, when the road was crawling with police officers, driving without your lights was tantamount to writing the word GUILTY on your forehead.

There was one bridge in and out of Belle Isle. The Savannah police would be streaking down one side while Andy, illuminated by the sun reflecting off the water, would be trying to sneak out of town on the other.

She pulled into the parking lot of what happened to be the Mall of Belle Isle. She jumped out of the truck and walked around to the back. Some kind of thick black tape covered the taillights. She picked at the edge and found that it wasn’t tape, but a large magnetic sheet. The other light had the same.

The corners were rounded off. The sheets were the exact size needed to cover both the brake lights and the back-up lights.

Andy’s brain lacked the ability to process why this mattered. She tossed the magnets into the back of the truck and got behind the wheel. She peeled away the construction paper on the console. Like the magnets, the paper was cut to the exact size. More black paper covered the radio and lighted buttons on the console.

She found the knob for the headlights. She drove away from the mall. Her heart was thumping against the side of her neck as she approached the bridge. She held her breath. She crossed the bridge. No other cars were on the road. No other cars were on the turn-off.

As she accelerated toward the highway, she caught a glimpse of three Savannah cruisers rushing toward the bridge, lights rolling, sirens off.

Andy let out the breath she’d been holding.

There was a sign by the road:

MACON 170

ATLANTA 248

Andy checked the gas gauge. The tank was full. She would try to make the over four-hour trip to Atlanta without stopping, then buy a map at the first gas station she found. Andy had no idea how far Carrollton was from there, or how she’d find the Get-Em-Go storage facility near the Walmart.

The unit number is your birthday. One-twenty. Say it.

“One-twenty,” Andy spoke the numbers aloud, suddenly confused.

Her birthday was yesterday, August twentieth.

Why had Laura said that she was born in January?

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