It gets louder as I turn the corner onto the side porch, narrower and darker than the main one facing the beach, nearly hidden by a row of overgrown azaleas my grandparents planted in the ’60s.
“Edie!” I yell out, stepping forward into the darkness only to feel my feet slip out from under me.
I land hard on my hip, my teeth catching my tongue sharply enough to make me gasp, rainwater cold on my bare legs beneath my shorts.
My phone has fallen out of my hand; I reach for it, fingers closing around it as I distantly hear Edie’s voicemail message start up again, and I look down at the screen, wanting to turn on the flashlight.
But something’s wrong with it, the light dimmer now, the words blurred, and for a second, I think maybe I dropped it too hard, maybe water got in it and that’s what’s making it look like there’s something smeared across the screen.
But then I realize that it’s blood—on the screen, on my legs—not rainwater. At first, I think it’s my blood, that I cut myself as I fell, cut myself so deep that I can’t even feel it.
It’s only when the phone’s flashlight beam lands on a pale hand with raggedy turquoise nails that I start to scream.
CHAPTER NINE
July 26, 2025
8 Days Left
It’s nearly three in the morning by the time I get back from the hospital.
Edie was still alive when the paramedics showed up, but barely. One of them told me that if I’d been just a few minutes later, it would’ve been too late, but looking at her—pale and motionless as they loaded her into the ambulance—I wasn’t sure I had found her in time after all.
Skull fracture, they said. It looked like she’d slipped on the side porch and cracked her head on one of the old stone planters out there, the heavy square base denting a spot just behind her ear before the fall sent her sprawling onto the porch steps, a sharp corner gouging a trench from her temple to the crown of her head. That was where most of the blood came from, the doctor said, but the wound to the back of her head was the serious one.
They’d had to cut a chunk of her skull away to relieve thepressure, and she was in a medically induced coma in the hopes that it would help with the swelling. They hadn’t let me go back to see her since we aren’t family, but the doctor, an older man with sad eyes, had told me that he’d call if anything changed, that the next forty-eight hours were critical, and that even if she did pull through, this was a very serious injury, especially for someone her age.
I absorbed all of it numbly, standing there in the St. Medard’s Bay emergency room, Edie’s blood drying in dark streaks down my legs, on my hands. For a small town, we have a surprisingly big hospital, and I was relieved Edie would get to stay close by instead of being sent to Mobile or Pensacola, but all I could think about was the blood—so much blood—and how could anyone lose that much of it and still be okay?
As I drive home from the hospital, my mind settles on something else, something less urgent but just as troubling: Why the fuck had Edie been out on that porch anyway? There was nothing over there—no furniture that needed moving, no repairs that had to be done. Even if therehadbeen, Edie had more sense than to go out in the rain, in thedark, to do them.
The weather cleared sometime around midnight, and the air is back to being thick and muggy as I make my way to my trailer. I’m so exhausted, so overwhelmed, that I almost don’t see August at first.
He’s sitting on the steps leading up to the Airstream, and as soon as he sees me, he jumps up, shoving his hands into his back pockets.
“Is she all right?” he asks nervously.
I have a vague memory of August and Lo waiting in the lobby as the ambulance arrived, of pale faces and wide eyes, but all my focus had been on Edie.
“They don’t know,” I tell him, my voice dull. “It’s… it’s bad.Really bad. But she’s alive, for now, so that’s… that’s something.”
My voice breaks on that last word, and August makes a soft sound low in his throat before coming closer, his arms wrapping around me.
He smells like laundry detergent and sunscreen and sweat, and his chest is warm and hard against mine, and I let him hold me, feeling like I can barely stay upright.
“God, that had to be awful,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”
I can only nod, then I pull away, gesturing down at myself. “I’m going to get blood on you,” I tell him, but he only shrugs.
“Wouldn’t be the first time while on the job. I once did an assignment on extreme piercings. I also followed this crazy tattoo artist for a week. A little mess doesn’t scare me.”
That makes me smile, or at least attempt it. Not so much the anecdote, just the fact that he offered it, that he’s trying to make this night seem a little less horrific. And despite my exhaustion, despite my appearance, I find myself asking, “Do you wanna come in for a drink?”
IPOUR USeach a couple of fingers of bourbon, then take mine into the tiny bathroom so that I can shower.
The blood on my legs and hands is dry now, and it flakes off as I scrub, the water turning pink as it sluices down the drain.
My skin is also pink as I towel off, from both the heat of the water and the brutal scouring I gave myself, but I feel a little more human by the time I emerge from the bathroom in a tank top and pajama shorts, my wet hair dripping over my shoulders.
