That wasn't Olivia.
She just stared out the window at the gray wash of trees and dirty snow rolling past. Her hands were folded in her lap, fingers interlaced so tightly her knuckles looked like polished bone. She was vibrating with a tension that radiated across the center console.
I wanted to reach out. I wanted to cover her hands with mine and tell her we didn't have to do this. That we could go back to her warm, safe kitchen and pretend Lucia Vance didn't exist.
But I kept my hands on the wheel at ten and two.
I had no reassurance to give. I was an accomplice leading her to the scene of the crime.
I turned onto Route 9 and the road opened up—two lanes of blacktop slicing through dormant farmland and state forest. It was a lonely road, flanked by skeletal trees that crowdedthe shoulder. The sky was a low, oppressive sheet of steel, threatening snow it probably wouldn't deliver.
"This is where it happened," Olivia said.
Her voice was sudden, cutting through the hum of the tires. I looked over and she hadn't moved. She was still staring at the tree line.
"What?"
"This stretch," she said, her voice flat. "The police said past the reservoir. We're getting close, aren't we?"
My grip on the steering wheel tightened until my own knuckles matched hers. I had driven this road twice in the last six days. I had driven it at night, in the rain, trying to see what Ryan had seen. Trying to understand how a man who drove like an old lady could lose control on a curve he’d likely driven a dozen times before.
"Yeah," I said, my voice rough. "It's coming up. About a mile."
She nodded once. A jerky, mechanical motion.
The mile disappeared in seconds.
I recognized the spot before we hit the curve. The grade of the road dipped slightly, banking left toward the water.
There were no flowers. No cross. No spray paint on the asphalt. The world had already moved on.
But the scar was there: the guardrail.
Fifty feet of it was brand new. The galvanized steel was bright and shiny, a violent contrast to the rusted, weathered posts on either side. A patch job on a wound that hadn't healed.
"There," Olivia whispered.
I felt her go still beside me. Not a breath, not a twitch.
I lifted my foot off the gas without meaning to. The truck coasted, the engine ramping down.
Beyond the bright new steel, the reservoir stretched out—a flat, black mirror reflecting nothing but the gray sky. It looked cold. It looked like the end of the world.
Ryan had been here.
He had been driving this curve, phone on the seat, head full of whatever ultimatum I had given him, whatever promise he had made to Lucia. And then—physics took over. Friction lost to ice, metal against metal.
Figure it out, Ryan. Fix it.
My own words echoed in the cab, louder than the engine.
"Keep driving," Olivia said.
Her voice was strangled, barely audible.
I pressed the gas and the truck lurched forward, the engine growling as we put the shiny metal behind us.
The silence that followed was heavier than before, as if it had grown teeth. I could hear Olivia’s breathing—shallow, controlled sips of air. She was holding herself together by sheer force of will, like a building with the load-bearing walls knocked out.
