It was a good question. Jesus, maybe he was being rash. Maybe he wasnt really ready to do this. Surely there was help somewhere out there. He could reach out to his mom and his wife, try to patch things up. He could find some other way out of this. Maybe

Sometimes giving up can be heroic. Sometimes it takes more courage to give up than to lower your head and forge on with something you know just isnt going to work.

That voice was much more pronounced in his head than his own. It was a voice hed heard on the phone about two hours ago, a comforting and warm voice. Its your life, so its also your death, that voice had also said. So shouldnt you be in charge of both?

He looked down to the street, dark and waiting. He could be down there in ten seconds, dead, life over, all of his problems gone.

It was easy to see in his head. Hed probably land face down. His skull would smash, his chest would be shattered, but hed probably feel very little of it. Still, the imagined sight of it was brutal. God, what the hell was he doing?

No. No…not now, he told himself. He took a deep breath and turned back to the suicide gate, wondering if hed be able to scale it. If not, he had his cell phone so he supposed he could call the cops. And wouldnt that be ironic? Hed wanted to avoid having people call the cops to thwart his plans and now here he was, wanting

The figure on the other side of the gate seemed to come out of nowhere, as if the night itself had manifested it.

Who

But that was all he got out. The figure stepped forward quickly and an arm came through the tight bars of the gate. A hand touched his chest, a gentle push at most, and he felt himself being pitched backwards.

By the time he realized what had happened, he had no time to scream. He drew in the breath but it never came out. In the end, he had been only half right. He indeed died very quickly and the pain was a brief flicker at most; but he died with his face looking up to the Williamsburg Bridge as a halo of blood leaked out from his shattered skull onto the pavement.

CHAPTER TWO

There was something about South Carolina that felt a little too southern to Rachel. She knew it was ridiculous, but it was a thought she could not escape. There was the intense pride in southern heritage for one thing, but she was pretty sure it just came down to the humidity. Yes, the summers in Virginia could be brutal, but the humidity a little further south seemed much more oppressive. The damned mosquitos being the size of hummingbirds didnt help either.