You’re going to kill someone, Shawn tells her.
It’s fine.
I’m serious, Em.
It would have been simpler to fly, but Salt Lake City’s airport is swamped for the holiday. She didn’t even want to go to this damn barbecue. She loves Shawn, but his family in Denver has always exhausted her.
Eyes on the road. Her husband’s voice bristles. He points at her phone on her knee while she drives. You’re driving. Let me navigate.
She’s fine. She’s always preferred to navigate herself, and right now, neither Emma’s Waze nor Shawn’s Apple Maps has the advantage anyway. Six hours on Interstate 80 becomes seven on Highway 40, then back again. Even the satellites are confused. The highway is blockaded with miles of cars stuffed with tents, coolers, and arguing kids. The heat wave is smothering, wildfire smoke from Yellowstone thickening the air.
Focus on the road.
She is.
There’s an accident somewhere blocking the two right lanes. She’s still cruising at seventy, but the traffic beside them is gridlocked. Metal, glass, and sideview mirrors hurtle past in strobes of reflected sunlight. She ignores the bleating horns, the gritty taste of campfire and exhaust, the migraine biting at her thoughts.
Her app chimes again. Stay the course? Or reroute to Highway 40?
Stay on the interstate, he says. It’s still fastest.
It’s not that Shawn’s parents dislike Emma. But as an architect and a lawyer, respectively, living in a house that must be visible from space, they’re also acutely aware that Emma majored in theoretical physics and teaches junior high math. They always ask her about work—the same immaterial questions about students and teaching methods, with their too-big smiles—but someday one of them will have one glass of perfectly aged wine too many and ask the true question: what’s your real plan? Because this state salary can’t be it. Surely their son didn’t just marry a schoolteacher.
They like you, Shawn always tries to reassure her. They just wish you’d talk more.
She knows he’s lying.
I wish you’d engage with my family.
She tries.
I wish you’d try harder.
She knows she should. But the selfish part of her dreads every holiday trip. It would be easier if his family were assholes, but they aren’t. They just have painfully wonderful lives. Shawn’s two brothers are bolder, brasher iterations of himself, too, and each always brings a more dazzling version of Emma on his arm. One year it was an actual actress with her own Netflix series. Whenever rich people find out you’re a teacher, they sigh this same precious sigh, like you just told them your dog died.
And Shawn doesn’t realize it, but she’s not actually paying attention to her phone’s map. It’s her Outlook email app that she’s secretly watching. Every time Siri’s mechanical voice reroutes, it’s an excuse to swipe to her email and check again.
Em, please stop looking at your phone.
Because if her coworker Crystal responds that she can’t cover Emma’s lesson plan next Friday (which she’s eighty percent sure she can’t), they’ll have no choice but to shorten an exhausting six-day Denver visit with Shawn’s family to a more survivable three. Her ace in the hole.
Emma swipes to refresh again.
There it is,
A new email from Crystal.
It begins with: Hey Emma—I think I can
Em—
Her husband’s voice rises with panic.
When she looks up, an eighteen-wheeler has veered from the stopped lane directly into hers, the semitrailer’s riveted tailgate oncoming at seventy.
“I’m sorry.”
Deek blinks. She’s not sure if he can hear.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
She releases the screwdriver. It seems to hover there, impaled just below his throat. Her eyes blur with tears, locked with his, as Deacon Cowl takes a tottering step backward and bumps a wall. A framed photograph drops and breaks.
“Deek, I didn’t know it was you—”
He slumps down the wall. She tries to hold him upright but loses balance and topples over with him, bruising her knees on hardwood. He claws blindly for the screwdriver, clasping his fingers around the handle—
“No.” She fights him. “No, don’t pull it out—”
Too late. A surge of fresh blood runs down Deek’s half-zipped raincoat and Emma slams her palm against his throat. Warm liquid spurts between her fingers. She can feel the life leaking out of him, and she did this. Not Howard. There’s no one else to blame.
This is my fault.
Like that hot day in July. Going seventy with her phone on her knee.
Oh God, I did this—
“Pressure. Keep pressure on it.” She guides his hand to his collarbone. His fingers are weak. It’s too dark to see the injury—did she slice his carotid? His windpipe? Can he even breathe?
The weight of it crashes down on her, crushing the air from her lungs. She’s made an awful, irreversible mistake. Deek entered the house to help her.
This is manslaughter.
He’s smaller than he looked in her telescope. Too small for his George Clooney head. He’s a compact little man, almost leprechaun-like, dwarfed by his raincoat sleeves. Heartbreakingly frail. The brilliant mind who guessed her Hangman words with uncanny precision, who in a past life helped Texas police catch the Stockyard Slayer, now lies bleeding, dying, in her arms.
She tugs off her sweatshirt and presses it to his chest. Not good enough. She searches the drawers in a nearby desk. Pens. Scissors. Stamps. And rattling inside the uppermost drawer, the best thing she can find: a roll of clear mailing tape.
She grabs it.
“I’m sorry. This is going to hurt.”
Deek unpeels his hands, giving Emma space to apply the tape in crackling spools. With bloody fingers, he points furiously across the living room. Over her shoulder, at the grandfather clock. He’s struggling to speak, mouthing one syllable, syrupy-thick: Run.
Across the house, the basement door bangs open.
Howard is coming.
She ignores it all and bites off another loop of clear tape. Glossy plastic traps air bubbles against blood and skin. Deek is still pointing urgently, gasping.
Run.
Run.
Run, his fading eyes beg. Leave me behind and run.
She can’t. She won’t. And it’s already too late anyway, because she hears combat boots enter the room behind her. Howard Grosvenor Kline is here.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.
Emma wishes to be underwater. Right now. In frigid darkness, her lungs bloating with seawater and her Osprey backpack gripping her shoulders with the weight of all her mistakes. She was always destined for this. Just like her mother, self-destruction is in her blood. Only Emma will drown in seawater instead of box wine.
She wishes it were simply over with, for this excruciating sensation to end, for the immense hurt to go away. She’d give anything for the hurt to go away.
She closes her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
To Deek.
To Shawn.
To everyone.