There was barely a splash. Just a rushing sound, lost in the roar of the rain. The gold puddle of the headlights fading to black.

The car disappeared fast.

I waited for a while, past the foot of the bridge. Making sure nothing came back up.

Now it has.

But it’s been long enough. My heart is calm.

Everyone else is pushing closer to the water. Craning. Lifting up their phones. They want a glimpse of what’s stuck inside those draining windows.

I don’t need to know.

All I wonder is whether she stayed belted to her seat. If she was knocked out on impact. If she tried, too late, to shove the door open against the steel-hard pressure of the water.

I hope the end was quick.

I walk away.

It will be all over the news in less than an hour. The police need help identifying a woman: late twenties or early thirties, dark hair, alone in an expensive black car.

I know who she was. I know what she was. But no one else needs to know.

I get my bike from the bridge railing, climb on, and pedal slowly toward home. Toward the shed. Toward the root cellar.

But no one needs to know that, either.

Anders

Wednesday is another sunny day. It feels like an insult.

I didn’t set my alarm last night, and nobody wakes me up. By the time I shove the covers off my head, Goblin is rrruckk-ing at the closed door, begging to be let out, and flickering sun is streaming through my bedroom window.

I check the clock. It’s 12:38, which means I’ve already missed more than half the school day. Apparently Mom and Dad have decided to let me skip again.

Last night, as soon as the pictures of that black Audi hanging over the river started to appear on the news, I think part of my brain came unplugged.

It wasn’t Frankie.

That’s all I could think, over and over. I couldn’t even move.

Dad kept trying not to look at me, like he was too afraid he might find me crying with relief, and Mom kept putting her arm around me and squeezing me and rubbing the back of my neck, and I could barely even feel it happening.

But then, when the news cameras zoomed in on the car—a glossy black Audi with Illinois plates—I started to think something else. Something that just went ohmygod ohmygodohmygod over and over. And when they posted the police description of the body found inside the car—a woman, around thirty, short hair, black clothes—my brain shorted out entirely.

It was the music executive. It had to be. And now she was dead.

I didn’t know what to feel, or what to do, and fear and relief and silence and guilt were all wadded together in my gut like a meal I wished I hadn’t eaten. And on top of all that, Frankie was still missing.

Sometime after midnight I finally staggered into bed. I dreamed about water and about being onstage at the Crow’s Nest, and I woke up so desperate to be up there that the memory of Last Things breaking up landed like a cinder block on my rib cage.