It was an accident, he tells me when I ask where Amanda has gone. She was upset. He couldn’t control her. He tried. He says I was there. That I held her hands behind her back, and he pushed her to the ground. He says I was jealous. That I watched him press his body weight against hers. He says he was trying to make her be quiet so he could comfort her, but holding her down didn’t work. Amanda has always been was always strong and feisty. It is was a joke among us that I am the porcelain baby, she the snorting bull, Sam the circus master. I don’t remember who came up with that joke. I don’t remember any of this happening.

They got into a fight. Amanda has been had been edgy lately. Things were tense between Sam and me, Sam and Amanda, me and Amanda. Three’s a crowd. She told me she wanted to leave. She wanted me to come. But it’s not my fault I couldn’t. She knows knew I can never leave Sam. I can’t ever leave Sam. He knows my mind like it is his. And then she was gone into the fog. I don’t know what happened after that.

He says he shouted her name. That he ran outside after her, and I stood just outside and watched them running, and for once, he stresses this part, we didn’t care who saw or heard us. Things will be bad, very bad, without Amanda. He tells me that, and I know it to be true because I feel it myself. She is was our double-sided tape. He says he couldn’t stop her, that she shot ahead and he found her a half mile away. There was a cluster of people around her body. He had to fight through them to see her. She was hit by a teenage boy driving a Jeep Cherokee. She must not have been looking while she ran.

It happened, he tells me. That is what happens when you choose Circle Nine instead of staying here, where it’s safe.

I’m not going anywhere, Sammy, I say.