What I did now would determine my future. Not just mine, though. It would determine Ben’s and Josh’s as well.

I was at another fork in the road: Do the right thing or the necessary thing. Tell the truth or protect those who were left.

Nate was dead.

I couldn’t lose anybody else.

I gathered all the little bottles of oxy, the baggies of fentanyl, the scales, Ben’s backpack of clothes, his little red notebook of customers. Every scrap of evidence I could find. I wiped everything down that I had touched.

The drugs and notebook I buried a little way up the path under a gnarled root growing in an arch from the frozen ground. I used a sharp stick to score a hole under the root, and covered everything with dead leaves and twigs. The snow was falling so hard it would, I hoped, be covered by the time the crime scene techs arrived. I hefted Ben’s backpack and the scales into the swirling water.

I ran back to the warehouse, using the branch of an evergreen to sweep at my footprints in the snow.

Somewhere in the distance, the faint crack of a gunshot ripped through the icy air. A stutter of silence. And then another.

My chest clenched. Ben had done it, then. That was why I’d given him the gun, wasn’t it? To get rid of Gabe? I didn’t feel any regret, though. No, only relief. An eye for an eye.

I hurried inside and knelt over Nate’s body. I touched his cheek where the blood had cooled into little icicles

“I am so, so sorry,” I whispered, closing his eyes with my fingertips. I kissed each eyelid and traced an X over his chest. “I won’t fail you. I won’t fail our son.”

I didn’t have to fake the tears that fell then, the horrible, awful keening that wrenched from my throat when I dialed 911.

CHAPTER 43

I WOKE SLOWLY, emerging into consciousness like a baby deer into a clearing, timid and uneasy.

Early-morning light filtered through partially open blinds, falling in watery sepia stripes on the floor. A numbing fog curled around my head, hovering over me like a mushroom cloud. Rhythmic beeps. The quiet shushing of shoes on linoleum.

Clutched in my hand was my father’s lucky poker chip.

I blinked and turned my head slowly to one side, seeing an IV stand, its thin tubing snaking under white sheets. And then I remembered.

The IV was in Josh’s arm.

Nate was dead.

Gabe was dead.

Ben was missing.

My heart blistered in my chest, turning into charred black ash. I curled my knuckles to my face and wept with horror and rage and regret, burying my head in the pillow and wishing the darkness would block out the guilt.

So much guilt.