She turned the radio on. A country station out of Plattsburgh was already fading to static in the valleys. A playlist on her phone worked better, something upbeat she could tap the steering wheel to. It helped. Her mind drifted to Ethan. What she would tell him. Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Or the weekend, when they could sit down and she could explain it properly. He wouldn't like it. He'd get quiet the way he always did when something bothered him, going still and pulling inward, and she'd have to wait him out until he was ready to talk about it. But it wasn't like she was leaving. It was a modeling job, not a marriage proposal.
College came next. September. The version of herself that existed six months from now, the one with a little money saved and a dorm room and classes that mattered. The contract onthe seat beside her felt like the first rung of a ladder she'd been staring at for years.
The engine coughed.
Fiona glanced at the dash. All the gauges looked normal. Oil, temperature, fuel. The tank was three-quarters full. She pressed the gas and the Focus responded, pulling ahead, and she told herself it was nothing. It was an old engine. Maybe bad gas? A hiccup.
Then it coughed again, harder, and the RPMs dropped. The engine sputtered, caught, sputtered again, and died. The power steering went with it and the wheel stiffened in her hands. She wrestled the Focus to the right shoulder, the tires crunching over gravel, and came to a stop at an angle against the tree line.
"Come on," she said. "Not now."
The key turned but the starter only cranked. It wouldn't catch. She tried again. Same thing. The dash lights flickered and held, the radio cutting out mid-song, and then everything went quiet except the ticking from under the hood and the sound of her own breathing.
She sat for a moment, both hands on the wheel, and looked through the windshield. The road ahead was empty. No lights. No houses. She'd passed the last one a few miles back, a farmhouse set far from the pavement with a single porch light that had been on. Behind her, the road curved away into the dark.
She got out. Crickets pulsed in the underbrush. She walked around to the front of the Focus, popped the hood, and propped it open. She held her phone up and shined the flashlight across the engine, moving the beam over hoses and wires and the fuse box. Nothing looked obviously wrong. Nothing was smoking or leaking. She didn't know what she was looking for, not really, but standing over an open hood felt better than sitting still.
She tried to call Ruby. The screen showed one bar that flickered and disappeared. She held it higher, walked a few steps down the road, tried again. No signal. She composed a text anyway and hit send, watching the progress bar crawl and then freeze. Message not delivered.
Fiona lowered her hand and stood on the shoulder. The dark pressed in from all sides. It wasn't threatening, exactly, but it was complete. No streetlights, no glow from a nearby town, nothing but the stars overhead and the black mass of the mountains against the sky. She could feel her pulse in her throat.
She walked back to the Focus and tried the ignition one more time. Nothing.
Then she saw them. Headlights, coming from behind her, rounding the curve she'd passed a few minutes ago. They moved slowly, the beams sweeping across the trees as the vehicle came around the bend, and for a moment the relief she felt was so sharp it was almost physical. Someone was here. Someone could help. She could get a ride to Elizabethtown or at least to somewhere with cell service and call a tow truck and still make the shoot if she hurried.
She stepped into the road and waved, holding her phone up so the flashlight would catch their attention. The vehicle slowed. It was a dark-colored sedan, she couldn't tell the make in the glare of the headlights. It pulled to a stop about twenty feet behind her Focus, idling softly, the headlights washing over her and the open hood.
For a few seconds nothing happened. Then the driver's window came down.
"Need some help?" The voice carried across the distance between them but she couldn't place it, couldn't tell if it belonged to a man or a woman. The headlights made it impossible to see the driver.
Fiona hesitated. She glanced at the screen. Still no signal. She looked up the road toward Elizabethtown, still twenty-something miles away, and then back at the sedan with its window down and its motor running.
"My car died," she called back. "I can't get a signal out here."
"Hop in. I can give you a ride."
She should have said no. Some part of her knew that. The same part that Ruby would have listened to, the cautious voice that lived in the back of every young woman's mind and spoke up on dark roads and in empty parking lots and at parties where the drinks tasted wrong. But the contract was on her passenger seat and the shoot was in less than an hour and she was eighteen years old and things like this didn't happen to people like her. They happened on the news. They happened to other girls.
"Thank you," Fiona said. "I really appreciate it."
She grabbed the contract and her bag from the Focus, closed the hood, locked the doors out of habit, and walked toward the sedan. The rear door opened before she got there. She climbed in and pulled it shut behind her.
The window went up. The sedan pulled away. The Focus sat on the shoulder with its hazard lights still blinking, growing smaller and smaller in the dark until there was nothing left but the road and the trees and the sound of the crickets filling the space where she had been.
6
The room had one window and it was barred. Sunlight came through in slats that fell across the table and the paperwork spread on top of it and the hands of the man seated at the far end, whose name Carter Lyle had already forgotten. There were three of them on that side. Two men in suits and a woman with a legal pad and a pen she hadn't used yet. On Carter's side there was a chair and a set of chains that connected his wrists to his ankles in a single loop of steel, and a prison guard in the corner who hadn't moved since they'd brought him in.
Carter sat in orange and said nothing. He'd learned a long time ago that nothing he said in rooms like this made any difference. The suits talked and the papers got signed and the world kept turning in the direction it had already decided to go, and anything he offered was just noise they'd use to feel better about what they were doing.
The man at the center of the table adjusted his glasses and read from the top sheet.
"Carter Lyle, this death warrant orders your execution in two weeks' time. For the crime of murder in the first degree of KaraEllison." He paused, as if the sentence required a moment to settle. "One week prior to your scheduled execution, you will be relocated to the intensive management unit at USP Terre Haute, Indiana, and placed on death watch for the duration of your remaining incarceration. Your attorney has been provided with the same forms and documentation." He looked up. "Do you understand everything I've just told you?"
Carter didn't answer. He sat with his hands flat on his thighs, the chain pooling between his knees, and looked at the man with an expression that wasn't anger or fear or defiance. It was nothing. A wall with no windows.
"Mr. Lyle?"
