“Shut. Up. Now.”

I’ve freed the car seat from the buckles. We’re all out of the car now, Kyle holding Grant. I have the car seat. Danielle is by the driver’s side, Anya by the passenger side.

Waving the gun, she gestured us all away from the car. Toward the parked car. We moved toward it, a small group of very nervous people. The snow still flew; the wind picked up.

“Put the child seat in back seat of that car,” Anya orders me.

“They’ll never let you get away with this,” Danielle said. “Anya. You know this. You know this won’t work.”

“I know it will.”

She was going to kill the three of us, I realized. Alone in this deserted town, with the cat in the window as the only witness. We will just have vanished. The police will look for us, but no one will be looking here, not for a while. And she will be long gone, certain she is right.

“I can’t get it to work,” I called to Anya, my voice in rising hysterics of frustration. I held the car seat up in front of me.

“Danielle, help her,” Anya said.

“I don’t know how those work,” Danielle said.

Danielle has a kid. Of course she can work one. She looked at me.

“Try again. Fix it.” Anya took a step forward toward me, anger flashing on her face.

And I threw the car seat at her. Hard. Straight at her face. “RUN, KYLE!” I screamed, but Kyle didn’t run. He just spun, putting his body between that gun and Grant, holding him close. Anya managed to get her arm partially up, but the car seat still hit her full in the face. I ran toward her, and Danielle ran toward her. Both of us grabbed at Anya’s arm, her nose bloodied from the car seat impacting her face. It was all a blur, Danielle grabbing at the gun and me grabbing at Anya and Anya saying clearly to me, “You don’t understand,” and then the gun fired, the sound awful in the cold quiet of the snowfall. But not so loud because the gun was aimed not at the sky but into her coat.

Anya jerked and Danielle and I looked at each other, each of us thinking, “You’re shot,” but it wasn’t either of us. Anya fell to the snow. It seemed to take forever, and then the blood was bright against the white.

And then a terrible silence.

Broken when you started crying, Grant, Kyle holding you, staring at the dead woman. Your dead mother who was never going to be your mother.

I touched her throat, but there was no pulse, no thrum of life.