I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to calm the headache that originated there. The pressure helped only a very tiny bit.

I said, “We have to make him pay.”

“We can’t,” he said. “Football coach, All-American dad. Who do you think they’ll believe?”

“It won’t be your word against his,” I said. “I saw it. I remember it, now.”

“He’s buddies with lawyers,” Solomon said. “And they’ll say ‘How convenient that you remember everything, all these years later.’ Poor kid, she fell out of a treehouse, went weeks in the hospital. Her best friend is a fucking mental case and he’s in trouble. She’s desperate to help him. She’d say anything. She may even believe what she’s saying. Poor kid.”

He was right, of course. Apparently he watched the same shitty cop shows as my mom.

“Some other way,” I said. “We can make him pay. I don’t know how, but . . .”

“Like what?” Solomon said. “Cut his brake lines? That man already did enough damage to me, Ash. I refuse to let him hurt me anymore. Or you.”

A train whistle split the night.

“We should move,” I said. “We’re pretty close to the tracks.”

“We’ll be fine where we are,” he said. “I come here all the time.”

We could hear the metal rails whine. These weren’t the freight tracks, where the trains came through slow and solemn. These were the passenger lines, that stretched north to Montreal and south to New York City, and from there to every city in the country. Follow them long enough, and we could get anywhere.

I took my hands off my eyes. The world looked different, now. Brighter. Weirder. I couldn’t see the other side of the river anymore.

The ground shook, as the train came nearer. I propped myself up on my elbows, to see it better.

The headlight cut the night in two, swinging around the bend, catching us in its wide, bright sweep. The conductor, who must have seen us, blew his horn. Three short toots, a friendly sort of hello. Probably train conductors saw a lot of weird shit out their windows.

And then it was screeching past us, and the light from the windows turned us a deep shade of amber. Solomon wasn’t looking. His eyes were on the sky. The rain. The spot where the moon was showing a rip in the clouds, in the distance, to the west, where they were ragged and torn, like maybe this storm would finally be coming to an end.

I looked. I saw the people inside, asleep or reading or watching things on phones or tablets. Some were looking out the window, but they were all peering into the distance, the Catskill Mountains, the lights of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge up ahead. Dreaming of their destinations.