Focused, but with no plan.

He settled onto I-93 North and eased his back against the car seat, now aware of how much tension he’d been carrying. The snow was already falling and it took only a couple of minutes before it became mesmerizing, wrangling Colin’s overtired brain. At one point, he caught himself drifting into the other lane and corrected, but not before earning a honk from another car. He waved to the offended driver, then powered his window down an inch, letting the cold air whip his senses back to attention.

Then he thought, what would be so bad if he just ran off the interstate? Maybe veer right into a ditch. Or the concrete support pillars of an underpass. Wouldn’t that just solve everything?

The thought of it became more hypnotizing than the snow. It was all so simple, as if he’d just made one random move and solved a Rubik’s Cube.

No more worries. No more pain.

He knew thoughts of suicide were common for people like him…young widows and widowers. But it was different knowing about these thoughts and having them. Knowing about them was like reading a bland brochure about signs of depression. Having these thoughts… Well, there was just a comfort to them he couldn’t rationalize. It was like winning Powerball. All his problems would be gone.

All it would take was a flick of the steering wheel. He’d want to take his seat belt off first, of course. The airbags might be meddlesome, but if he accelerated to seventy or eighty, they wouldn’t be enough to save him.

There was an overpass coming up. Maybe a half mile away. Less, even.

Colin put his foot on the gas, passing the rest of the cars that were taking the snow with caution. Once he had a clear shot, he swerved into the right lane, nearly losing control of the car before he wanted.

Sweat breached the surface of his forehead, which was strange, because he felt as calm as he’d been in years.

Sixty-five.

Seventy.

Seventy-five.

The overpass loomed, closing in fast.

How strange, he thought. That could be the place I die. Right there. Just ahead. Seconds from now. Right there.

I wonder if someone will put a cross there for me and if there will be flowers?

Some distant pocket of his brain raised a feeble protest, yanking the luring thoughts away for a split second. Long enough for Colin to force himself into a decision.

Consider the options. Don’t just kill yourself. You have to choose to kill yourself.

He didn’t ask God what he should do. He asked the next biggest thing.

“Okay, Google, what should I do?”

The app’s answer was immediate and her voice sounded different from before. Lower. Commanding.

“Fifty-nine minutes to Bury, New Hampshire.”

Colin laughed. Laughed like a lunatic inadvertently released from forced psychiatric observation. Laughed until it hurt, which was long enough to whiz by the underpass, careening into none of it.

When his laughing eased and he became more comfortable with the idea that he was likely losing his mind, Colin eased his foot off the gas and drove like everyone else on the road. Cautious and conservative.