I scream this time, long and loud, and I run. I need to check, I have to check, this isn’t something you just assume, I run to him, press my hands to his cheeks, check for a pulse. How do you check for a pulse? Fuck, fuck, fuck—

“John,” I say, “John,” like he might just draw a breath and answer. “Oh no, John, no…”

The bumper crushed his chest.

He’s, how, how? I touch his cold cheeks, pat his wild gray hair down like he’s a child, like he’s alive, my fingers getting number and number until I can’t even bend them, and I finally hear Max right next to me.

He’s barking at John. Over and over. Just barking.

I walk away backward, up the hill, mouth open, no sound, no breath, like a rock is caught in my throat.

I spin, see the village chimneys so far off, impossible, impossible, the sea, the rocks, the grove staring. Staring at me.

I did this, I think, I’m a killer, she was right, it was me, but that’s insane, I’m going insane.

I spin and spin, eyes so dry they hurt, and I see the lighthouse.

“You headed up to see Matty, then?”

I run for it.

8:00 A.M.

I stumble, sprint, scream soundlessly down the craggy path to the lighthouse and pound on its flaky blue door. No one answers, but Matthew Clare’s motorbike is parked in the grass, and faint noises issue downward from a window high in the tower.

I pound again. “Come on, come on.”

Two heartbeats of hesitation, and I try the door. It opens easily, ricocheting against the granite wall inside.

No one locks anything here. No one’s afraid of anything but one thing, this thing that is happening right now.

The stairs are impossibly narrow and steep and in terrible repair. I cling to the rope railing, panic smearing my vision, until I reach the keeper’s room at the top. I take it in between frantic blinks: unmade bed, tidy desk, table crammed with radios, signal devices?—electronics, I have no idea which—and him, black curls, wide back slumped over a machine that is doing nothing but shrieking static.

He’s not moving. No. This cannot be happening.

“Matty,” I call out.

He startles upward, turning to stare at me in apparent shock.

I’m shocked too. In shock, shaking, but—why did I use his nickname? It just came out. I thought he might be dead and that was the name I reacted with, as if I knew him at all.

He’s alive. That’s good, obviously, but his eyes are red-rimmed, broadcasting pain so raw it makes me want to flee.

I don’t. We stare at each other. Our silence is louder than the static from that machine.

He turns it off. “It’s started, then.”