His eye makes a slight popping sound, like a grape bursting, when I drive the metal through it.

Chapter Forty-Four

I tumble over the side of the boat and plunge beneath the surface of the water. Even then I can hear him screaming. My ankles are still bound, and my clothes are so heavy I nearly don’t make it up for a breath. I struggle out of my father’s vest and let it drop. But I can’t get my ankles free, not with my fingers half-numb and my body still heavy with drugs.

When I surface, I see the bonfire blazing in the distance, and not a single person standing there to watch. Like I thought. No point in screaming. The stereo is blasting “Sweet Caroline.” I’ve always hated that song.

Brent has stopped screaming. I can’t see him at all. The boat rocks on the wind-ruffled water, its silhouette dark against the sleek reflection of the moon in the water.

I slip under the water again and come up coughing. I try to fumble off my shoes but this takes me under again. Each time it’s harder to break through to the oxygen above, so I give up.

I start to swim toward the shore. For a second I imagine I see a flashlight blinking through the trees. But the light blinks out again as soon as I try and focus on it.

My heart feels like it, too, is swollen with water. Head down, head up. My jeans weigh a thousand pounds. The shore seems to be getting farther, not closer. I’m gasping for breath, choking on my fear, wishing for things I haven’t wished for in forever: for my mother to hold me, for my father, for God to save me—for anyone.

I sink. Fight for the surface. Sink again. Up and down. Barely making any forward progress. If I can just make it, I can hide in the woods. I can lose him; I know these woods better than he does, better than anyone does.

But even as I think it, an enormous amount of light dazzles the surface of the reservoir, illuminating even the logs floating in the shallows a hundred feet away.

I turn around and am blinded by floodlights: Brent has powered them on, lighting up a clear path between us. The hum of his engine grows to a roar as he wheels around.

And points the boat straight at me.

“Help!” There’s no point in screaming but I do anyway, taking in another mouthful of water. “Help!” The boat comes so fast it cleaves a wake behind it. Thirty feet away. Fifteen.

I’ll never make it. I have no strength to swim anymore.

It’s the craziest thing: just before I drop, before I let the water take me, I swear I see Kaycee Mitchell step out of the trees, almost directly on the place my father and I buried Chestnut. Not Kaycee as she was the last time I saw her, but Kaycee the child, Kaycee my best friend, skinny and long-legged, just a flash of blond hair and a strong, urgent message she sends out across the water.