PROLOGUE
“I can’t look,” I said, clapping a hand over my eyes. I had sworn to myself there would be no more dead bodies. Not that any of the other four had been my fault (at least, not entirely), but I already had enough blood on my hands to last a lifetime—or possibly four lifetimes in a state penitentiary—and I didn’t think I could stomach one more corpse. Especially not this one.
“Tell me when it’s over.” I clutched Vero’s arm with my other hand as we stood on the shoulder of a six-lane highway. A tractor trailer whipped past us, throwing a thick wave of exhaust at our faces. When my children’s nanny didn’t answer, I peeked at her sideways between my fingers. Her long, dark ponytail blew across her eyes and she scraped it away, her attention rapt on the traffic in front of us, her neatly plucked eyebrows pinched in concentration.
“What do you think?” my mother asked, leaning toward her while both of them stared intently at my ex-husband’s back. He toed the gravel beside the white line at the edge of the highway, knees loose, shoulders hunched, hands shaking out the last of his nerves as he prepared to make what was arguably the most stupid decision of his life. And believe me, that was saying something.
“I give him twenty to one,” Vero said.
My mother’s eyes went wide. “You think?”
“It’s really more like nineteen to one,” Vero said over the whine of a crotch rocket, “but I rounded up because I’m an optimist.”
My mother nodded, too, as if this all made sense to her.
“You two are betting on Steven’s life!” I shouted over the roar of a moving truck.
“We’re notbetting,” Vero said. “We’re just calculating his odds of actually making it across—”
“And back,” my mother pointed out helpfully.
Vero smirked. “I’ve got to tell you, Finn. It doesn’t look good.”
“You two are not helping!”
“You’re right,” my mother said, touching the cross at her throat.
Vero nodded. “We should probably push him.”
“Have you both lost your minds? The children are watching!”
My mother held up a finger. “That’s an excellent point. I’ll go sit with the children and cover their eyes.”
“Bothof you wait in the car with the children.Iwill handle this.” I turned Vero around by the shoulders, back toward my mother’s SUV. My daughter’s face was pressed against the back window. Her little brother wriggled against the straps of his car seat to see where we had gone.
I had tried to convince Steven to keep driving. I’d insisted we could buy our son a new nap blanket at the next shopping mall we passed, but when Zach had pushed his threadbare blanket out the narrow gap in the open window of my mother’s Buick, wailing as it flew across oncoming windshields and under speeding tires until it finally came to rest, caught on a piece of rebar in the concrete barrier in the median like a battle-worn white flag, Steven had been behind the wheel and there’d been no stopping him.
He’d set his jaw and put his foot down on the gas. I’d pleaded with him from the third-row seat not to do it as he’d merged onto the next exit ramp and retraced our path to Zach’s blanket, but my argumentshad been drowned out by Zach’s hiccuping wails as Steven had pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway and put the SUV in park.
I shooed Vero and my mother back to the Buick to sit with the children. Steven hardly noticed when I tapped on his shoulder and repeated his name. His gaze remained fixed on Zach’s woobie as he stood beside the white line and hiked up his pants. He leaped back as a mud-spattered pickup on monster tires screamed past him, a pair of steel truck nuts swinging from its hitch. Delia shouted out the window of the van, “You can do it, Daddy!”
Vero called out, “May the odds be ever in your favor.”
My mother gave him two thumbs up through the glass, and Zach cheered.
I grabbed Steven by the back of his puffy vest as he rolled up his sleeves. “This is insane! There’s a Walmart at the next exit. We can get Zach another blanket. I’ll rub some apple juice and car grime on it. He’ll never know the difference.”
“He doesn’t want another blanket. He wants that one,” Steven said, pointing across the highway. “And I’m going to get it for him.”
“What are you trying to prove?”
He whirled on me, hot breath steaming from his lips. “What am I trying to prove?” He gaped at me as if the answer should have been obvious. “I’ll tell you what I’m trying to prove! I’m…” Steven’s blue eyes grew suddenly wide, focused on something behind me. I turned, my spine going ramrod straight as a state trooper eased onto the shoulder of the highway behind us, rolling to stop a few yards away. I stole a backward glance at my mother’s SUV. Vero sank lower in her seat. Steven frowned at the officer as he got out of his car and strode toward us.
“Car trouble?” the trooper asked, removing his sunglasses and tucking them into his coat.
Steven crossed his arms over his chest, his lips thinning as he was forced to meet the trooper’s gaze. “No trouble.”
The officer glanced at the Virginia license plate on the back of my mother’s vehicle. “Where are you folks headed?”
