I killed the engine.
The horn kept going.
I could not feel my right hand. I waited. I felt it come back into my arm like a hot wire. I made it close. It closed.
I got the door open with my shoulder. The metal had bent enough that the latch fought me. I shouldered it twice. It went.
Blood was in my eye. I put the heel of my hand to my forehead and the heel came away wet and I could not find the place the blood was coming from with my fingers. The skin on the side of my head was hot and slick and the wet was going down the side of my neck into my collar.
I got one foot onto the dirt. Then the other.
Behind me on the road the sedan had pulled up. The doors were already opening. Two of them. I heard a third.
Do not be here when they reach the car.
I went into the trees.
The ground was wet. The leaves under my shoes went sideways. I kept my weight forward. I put a hand on a trunk and pushed off it. I put a hand on the next trunk and pushed off it. I got fifty yards in before I had to stop and put both hands on a tree and wait for my chest to remember how to be a chest.
Voices behind me on the road. A language I half knew. Not Russian. Close to Russian. Something east of it. I did not stop to place it.
I ran.
I ran as hard as a man can run with the corners of his eyes going dark. I went down a slope. I went through a streambed. The cold of the water came up over my ankle into my shoe and I did not slow. I went up the other side of the bank on my hands and my feet for the last yard of it. I kept going. The voices behind me went small. The voices went smaller. The voices went into the wind in the tops of the trees and out of it.
My head was wet down the whole side of my neck now. The wet had soaked the collar through to the shirt and the shirt was sticking. My ears were ringing the high small ring they ring after a hard hit. I could hear my breath inside the ring and not much else.
I made a hundred yards more.
I made fifty after that.
I made twenty after that.
I saw something low at the edge of my vision. A light. A porch light, maybe. Or a fallen branch the shape of a light. Or the inside of my own head making me a kind thing to walk toward. I went toward it. The legs took back the permission they had beengiving me. I went down on one knee. I waited for the knee to do what a knee does. The knee did not do it. I went down on the other.
The cold of the leaves came up my arm into my sleeve.
Ptichka.
I got one hand into my coat. I got my fingers on the phone. I pulled the phone out. The screen lit. The screen swam. I tried to find her name in the list of names. The names slid sideways. I touched the screen. I did not know what I touched. I touched it again.
The phone was warm in my hand and far away from it at the same time.
I put my cheek on the leaves.
The cold of the ground came up under my jaw.
There was a thing I had to say to her. I had been carrying it for three days and I had not let myself put it into a sentence yet, and I knew the shape of the sentence now, here, on the ground, with the wet of my own blood under my ear, and I opened my mouth around the first word of it.
10
CHLOE
The gravel under my boots made the small clean sound it makes when the morning is still cold and nothing has been driven across it yet. I had asked the cab to leave me at the gate. I wanted to walk the rest on my own. I wanted my own feet between me and the front door of the Sorokin house.
The willow Lily had planted by the fieldstone wall was dropping the last of its yellow. A small pile of it had gathered against the stones, and a few of the long thin leaves were lifting off the pile each time the wind moved. I watched it for a second and then I made myself keep walking.
I had come to forgive him. That was the whole shape of the morning in my chest.
