They weren’t wrong. After that Sunday afternoon when she’d had that first drink, she hadn’t been able to go back. It’s just peer pressure, the school had told her worried parents after she’d been drunk at a dance. This will scare her and she’ll stop. After all, she had so much to lose. Williams College had offered her early acceptance. She was captain of the cross country team. In the running for valedictorian.

And then, after they’d found vodka in a water bottle she kept in her locker, the counselors had gotten involved. It’s survivor’s guilt, they’d said. That one she’d read just recently in her mother’s emails and it all made perfect sense now. How they made her go to therapy sessions where they talked about how she’d done nothing wrong by continuing to live.

After the third time when she’d passed out in the school bathroom, drunk off her ass, the month before graduation—her grades on free fall—they’d had no choice but to expel her. The new theory—she was looking for attention. She’d tried to get it by being good but it hadn’t been enough. Now she had to be bad. The horror that had followed was now a powerful, visceral memory. Therapy sessions with both parents, telling her they loved her and how sorry they were that they hadn’t noticed her suffering because they’d been dealing with their own.

No one listened to her about the hollow spaces that nothing could fill. They didn’t understand how they’d come to be there if not from some affliction out of their textbooks. She wished she’d had a film of it—of Annie running and Nic screaming and then the car and the blood. The dozens of missed calls on her phone from their mother, begging to know if they were all right. Why hadn’t Annie made it to her friend’s house for the playdate?

The look on Evan’s face. The image of their mother holding her dead child. The harrowing sound that left her body that Nic could still hear.

Guilt. Despair. Self-loathing. There were so many words to describe what lived in those hollow spaces. They laughed in the face of the counselors and their box of shit.

And now she’d caused their mother’s disappearance with her wretched words. Gone or dead—there was no way around it, no thinking her way out of those scenarios.

Confusion. Panic—she had to get someplace quiet, alone, before people started to notice.

She walked along the side of the wall, head down, away from the entrance to the casino. There was a hallway on the other side with restrooms, elevators, conference areas. And a business center.