After a moment, Gabe stood. He wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve.

“Did it go over the falls?” I asked, peering over the ledge. “I can’t see. Did it go over?”

“I don’t—I don’t know! It’s too dark.”

“It needs to go over!” I’d started to shake, my voice turning shrill.

“Emma.” Gabe put a hand on my arm. In a complete role reversal, he was suddenly calming me. “I’m sure it did. Look.” He pointed at the swirling water. “The current’s pretty fast.”

I nodded, my teeth chattering. The mist mingled with the sweat on our skin. I stared in the direction of the waterfall, hearing the power and brilliance of its roar. It was both beautiful and brutal.

When I was a kid, my family used to come hiking up here. The river sent a massive volume of water coursing over a cluster of large boulders and hurtling down three hundred feet in two tiers. Water skipped over the first tier—a broad, fan-shaped fall—to a gently domed ledge, then plunged a further two hundred feet into a narrow amphitheater gorge.

We stood, watching the water, until a severe black cloud obscured the moon, releasing a fine rain that eventually drenched my hair. Water dripped down my cheeks like tears.

“Come on, let’s go,” Gabe said.

Back inside the warehouse, it was cold and damp. Gabe relit the lantern, and we sat on opposite sides of the table, shivering, shocked. I closed my eyes, running images of Josh on the screen of my inner eyelids. I was doing this for him. I had to keep that in mind.

I tried to think of all the evidence we would need to hide, to think like Nate.

“Where’s her car?” My eyes popped open. “There was only one car outside. Is it yours or hers?”

“It’s mine. We left hers at the Target on the other side of town. She didn’t know how to get here.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

In the stark shadows cast by the lantern, Gabe’s eyes were hard to read. Could I count on him to stay silent? And what if he didn’t? What would I do then?

I straightened. “Okay. You remember the plan?”

He lifted the backpack of cash I’d given him. “I’ll set up a bank account, deposit this five K, and transfer it into the GoFundMe account for Josh.”

I needed the cash to pay for Josh’s treatment, but I figured it was smarter to have smaller payments, so I’d decided to split the money between the GoFundMe account and a checking account I planned to open.

“Right. I’ll take the briefcase and try to open it.” I thumped it with my foot. “There’s cash in there we can split. And I have to get those prescriptions I wrote. I can’t have anybody find them.”