At some point on I-95, between Savannah and the border to Florida, Sara had an epiphany.
The engine of Maddie’s borrowed truck rumbled loudly, loud enough to be concerning, as if smoke might start spewing from beneath the hood at any moment, as if it might break down at any moment and leave her stranded on the side of the highway. But it held for the entirety of the trip, a trip that should have been eleven hours, twelve with traffic, but ended up being fourteen with the frequent stops. The truck was a gas-guzzler.
But Sara didn’t mind. She was in no rush. She stuck to I-95 southbound and after a while the rumbling of the truck’s engine just became another sound, the way people grew accustomed to the sound of blood rushing in their own ears, almost comforting even, the way the gentle snoring of someone sleeping beside you could be. She had turned her phone off, and she didn’t turn on the radio, or talk to anyone at the gas stations she stopped at. She just kept driving.
She just hoped that Maddie wasn’t keeping tabs on the odometer.
Sara had told her that her younger sister was missing. That part was true; Mischa was gone. Sara had told her that she would go looking for her younger sister. That part was not true; she had no idea where Mischa was and no way to locate her other than texting and asking, and she doubted she’d get a straight answer.
Mischa would be fine. She was smart, capable, and independent.
Sara was capable and independent too. But maybe not quite as smart as she thought.
That’s where the epiphany came in. Even the name of it escaped her, or it had for a bit. She didn’t have Maya’s brain or Mischa’s voracious appetite for knowledge or her dad’s ability to recall endless facts about history. She kept thinking “euphony” for some reason.
This is a euphony. No, wait, that’s not right.
Timpani? No. That’s a music thing.
At last it came to her—epiphany!—and she had a word for the realization she’d made.
When she’d first heard about Maria’s death, when Alan had come in the middle of the night to tell them what had happened, she’d felt… how had she felt? Not helpless. That wasn’t quite right. Helpless meant she couldn’t do anything without help, and that wasn’t true.
Incapable? No… she’d proven otherwise more than once.
Ineffective. That was it. That was how she felt. Ineffective, and inadequate.
People got hurt every day; there was no stopping it. All she had been trying to do was make sure the right people got hurt and didn’t hurt anyone else. But those people, the ones she was hurting, they had already done their share of hurting. And they wouldn’t stop just because they were hurt. People like that would never just stop.
She knew that, because she was a person like that. She’d been hurt, and she’d done her share of hurting, and she wasn’t going to stop either. How was she any better than them? Because her motives were virtuous? How could she guarantee that the people she hurt never hurt anyone again? She couldn’t. Not really.
Unless…
It was long after dark by the time she reached Jacksonville, and she stopped once more to refuel, and then drove on to a not-great neighborhood on the east side of town. She slowed down a bit as she passed a beige storefront in a small strip mall, its façade dark after closing, though the two words painted on the inside of the window in large white strokes were still visible: SWIFT THRIFT, where she used to work.
Sara kept driving, and soon she passed a brown, ramshackle two-story house on a tightly packed street. There were lights on inside but the blinds were closed. She thought about her former roommate and friend Camilla, who had completed rehab in Virginia and gone god-knows-where, because Sara wasn’t the greatest at keeping up with people, and she wondered if Tommy and Jo still lived there. But she didn’t stop.
It was here she’d lived for nearly a year after emancipating herself from her dad. This wasn’t where it had started for her; it had started long before that, with her mother’s murder and her father’s lies, with being taken from her home and pushed into the clutches of traffickers and sent halfway around the world and leaping from a moving train.
It hadn’t started here, but this was where she had come to escape it. This was where she’d tried to run, and turned to drugs to forget and to feel better, and for a while it worked. But ultimately even drugs had been ineffective. Inadequate.
She kept driving, surprised that she remembered the way so easily, and soon she parked on a street outside a rowhouse with grimy siding and a broken washing machine on the front porch.
Sara had briefly been a runner for a local dealer named Ike—her dealer, in fact—who had brought her on in exchange for his goods and because she looked innocent and wasn’t likely to be stopped or harassed by the cops. It had kept her hooked, for a while, until the day she stole the package she was supposed to deliver and OD’d in a stolen car parked by the beach.
She had barely any memory of that day anymore, and they never really talked about it, but it was her dad who found her somehow, who had tracked her down and found her there alone and dying, and he saved her life and brought her back north with him.
How many times? How many times had she been helpless, and he had swept in and saved her? How many times had she needed what she was trying to give to these other women—some semblance of safety? Too often.
She would not be helpless anymore.
Sara got out of the truck, stretched her legs. She heard voices through open windows but there was almost no one out on the street at this time of night.
It hadn’t started here, but Rais, the man who had taken her and her sister, he was dead. The traffickers he had passed them on to were either dead or in custody. There was no going back for them, no one to go back for, so it may as well have started here.
Sara walked past the broken washing machine on the front porch and she knocked on the front door. Inside a dog started barking, deep and throaty woofs from the thick-necked Rottweiler that she knew was fairly friendly unless you made a threatening move toward his owner.
“Shut up, already!” a voice shouted at the dog, a male voice, and then the door swung open, the inside door, leaving the thin screen door with the tear in it between them.
The guy was tall, muscular, tattooed, wearing a black tank top and a flat-brimmed cap. He looked almost the same as she remembered, and had to remind herself that it wasn’t all that long ago she’d last seen him, no matter how long ago it felt like.
Ike squinted for a moment, and then his eyes widened in recognition, and then narrowed again in anger, all in the span of three seconds.
“You,” he hissed. The dog barked again behind him. “Shut up!” he snapped at it. “You must be out of your damn mind, showing up here after what you did to me.”
Sara said nothing.
“And now you’re here on my porch after, what, a year? You looking to score or something?” He scoffed. “No way I’m selling to you. I got half a mind to slap a bitch. You best get out of here before I do.”
Still Sara said nothing. She didn’t move, didn’t blink. Just stared.
“What are you, deaf and stupid?” Ike shoved open the screen door, and now there was nothing between them, nothing to stop him from hurting her if he wanted to. “Swear to god, little girl, don’t think I won’t…”
Ike raised an arm as if he were about to backhand her.
Sara raised an arm too, holding the Glock level with his chest.
“Shit,” he said softly.
She fired once. It was shockingly loud, explosive even, but she liked the way the gun jumped in her hand. It felt powerful.
Ike’s mouth fell open and he looked down at the hole in his black tank top.
The dog barked. Someone inside screamed. A woman, by the sound of it.
She fired again. A third time. Four, five, six. With each shot Ike’s body jerked and he took another involuntary step back, but Sara didn’t move. The dog barked, but he’d retreated to a corner, terrified by the deafening blasts. She could see the bottom of the stairs, where a dark-haired Latina woman cowered, covering her head with her hands.
Finally Ike fell, already dead before he hit the floor.
Sara turned and strode quickly back to the truck. There were other noises now, confused voices through open windows and shouts of alarm, so she started the truck’s rumbling engine and she floored it down the street, away from there, headed back north.