FIFTY-SEVEN

CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION

Boom. She cracks hard into an empty swimming pool carried on the back of a flat-bed trailer— a stack of swimming pools, actually, three piled atop one another and held to the truck with wide white straps. The horse-kick of pain transitions swiftly to a dull roar of misery throughout her body.

She gasps, lying on her back. Arms spread out, cruciform.

I really wish the pool had been filled with water first.

Still. Nothing seems broken. Moving her limbs hurts like a sonofabitch— and yet, they move. Nothing falls off. All her organs remain firmly ensconced inside her body.

She’s going to have a helluva bruise, though.

It’ll match all the others.

This truck heads southbound on the turnpike. Opposite to the direction she had been going in the car with those two so-called Feds.

That means she has to get off this truck. Right? She has to get back to her mother’s, has to stand in Ashley’s way, has to get the Malibu—

But then she thinks, fate is a river with dark, fast-moving waters. That’s what she hates about it. The inevitability of it. The illusion of choice—paddle left, paddle right, the rapids will still carry you where they want to carry you. She feels a spike of pride that she’s the riverbreaker, a big stone that parts the waters, that changes the course of the river, that turns one straight line into two divergent ones.

Today, though, she doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting.

Today, fate is not her foe—it is her friend.

Why fight it? She’s seen the future. She knows where fate takes her.

It puts her on a boat. With Ashley Gaynes. And her mother.

Her mother, who’s probably already gone. Ashley’s taken her already. Miriam feels it like a steel wire threading through her marrow: A grim certainty that she’ll go back to the house and find no one there. And he’ll taunt her with it. He’ll leave a note. Or call her. Something to remind her that she’s always one step behind— a little boy chasing a red balloon right into path of an oncoming SUV.

Fuck that. Instead of fighting it, she’s going to go with it.

Fate is like gravity. If she lets herself go, it’ll always pull her down.

She’ll go all the way to the bottom. Right to the boat. Right to the moment that it matters. She wanted to avoid that, but she’s been struggling against it to no avail. The bottom is where she belongs.

The end is where she lives. And she’s learned so much along the way.

Southbound it is, then.

Mile zero, motherfucker.

Besides, she’s tired. Really goddamn tired. All parts of her feel weighed down— a corpse dragged to the ocean floor by heavy chains.

She curls up in the scalloped edge of the pool. Wads herself up in a fetal ball. Miriam sleeps. And for once, she does not dream.