1
She’s nothing but a goddamn liability.
Sweat dripped down the man’s forehead as he steered, eyes transfixed on the red taillights of the car in front of him in the darkness. There was no guardrail despite the drop-off to his right and the inky black void that hovered over the ocean.
He’d followed her today, needing to see for himself that she would keep her word. Now he was fucked because she had not. The joints of his fingers were stiff as rusted bolts around ancient screws. He could picture what he needed to do, see the impact that would send her to her death, but indecision pitted every muscle against its opposite.
His foot pressed the pedal toward the floorboard, the taillights getting closer as his car ate up the road between them. Abruptly he leaned back and lifted his foot, the accelerator popping to its upright position as perspiration burst from his skin like water squeezed from a sponge.
Could he kill someone? Just like that? And not just anyone, but a friend. Nausea roiled in his gut. His eyes shifted to the rearview mirror, looking for headlights in the night, something to take this decision out of his hands, a witness. But there was nothing to stop him, no one to see.
He counted the reasons it was right, the justification warring with his conscience as his foot came down on the accelerator. He moved alongside her, straddling the yellow line, adrenaline painting the scene with wide, bold strokes. But his hands wouldn’t move, the tiny baby she carried in her womb torturing him with its very existence.
He was about to kill an innocent woman and the child she refused to erase, a child whose birth held the potential to end life as he knew it. Genetics would see to that.
Black or white.
Success or failure.
Life or death.
The crush of ambivalence was a physical war inside him, his muscles rigid, sweat streaming from his pores like foul water from a rusty faucet. A sob hung low in his throat. He couldn’t do it. He just could not. What would happen to him now?
He turned toward her and their eyes met, hers wide with fear. She hit the brakes and he worked to match her speed, desperate she not escape. She’d seen him. She would be lightning-quick to tell the world his sins. That was her job, after all. A goddamn reporter.
Unless you stop her.
He touched her bumper, just a bump, desperate to corner her vehicle and control what happened next, but he forced her car too close to the edge. Even if he stopped now, she would go to the police and the house of cards he’d created would come fluttering to the ground. There would be jail time, or worse.
With one swift movement, he jerked the steering wheel to the right, slamming into the side of her car and jarring him with the reality of what he’d done. She took off fast and he followed, his thoughts running through flowcharts of possibilities, all of them bad. He caught up to her and rear-ended her vehicle, but he’d underestimated the force required to push her off the road.
A memory flashed in his mind, the hot pavement of a country road and the deer he’d hit with his dad’s Pontiac, the repeated blows of a heavy shovel not enough to put the animal out of its misery. He’d driven away in childish tears, the doe writhing on the pavement behind him.
He would not make the same mistake twice.
Her car careened around a wide curve, the image of the dying animal spurring him on as he chased her. He drove alongside her and cranked the steering wheel hard right. She swerved onto the gravel-covered shoulder.
He hit her again, harder this time, hard enough, leaving himself only a split second to correct his course before he went off the road right with her. He slammed on the brakes, his breath coming in great gasps as he turned and saw her taillights disappear into the abyss.
“Jackie!” he screamed. He imagined her car flying toward the ocean with her strapped tightly inside. Her name was a wail, full of horror and remorse, bursting from his lungs. “Jackieee!”
2
Eight Years Later
It was nearly dark by the time Jackie closed the wooden shutters on the last of the cabanas, her hands glowing an eerie white against the deep blue that had swallowed up the landscape. Her bare feet were cushioned by the sand, warmth leftover from the sunshine that had beaten down that afternoon. Now the air was briny and sharp with ozone, a harbinger of the coming storm.
She slammed her finger between the doors, cursing and blaming herself for not starting this job in the daylight.
So much to do.
The front had rolled in quickly, covering the sunset with deep purple clouds and staining the surf a foreboding green. Goosebumps covered her arms despite the humid breeze, the sound of the ocean waves crashing like the pulse of an angry animal.
It was the first in a string of growing, spinning systems moving toward them over the gulf. She’d overheard some women at the grocery store that morning. For hurricane season in Mexico, it could have been much worse, they said—mucho peor. But it didn’t seem so great to Jackie, the woman who’d been raised in upstate New York shoveling snow instead of dodging palm fronds and facing down Mother Nature’s fury.
Now she knew all too well what those storms might bring. She’d endured seven hurricane seasons before this one, and she would endure seven times seven more if that was what it took for her to stay. Her life in the United States had been full of storms of a different kind, far less predictable than the weather.
She tested the front door of each cabana one final time to be sure it was latched securely, its porch clear of anything that might take flight, her eyes catching on a seashell sign that hung beside the door, and a flash of pride warmed her belly.
