She looked at him. He saw her, but all of his vision had become peripheral as his sight turned inward, watching, seeing how this had arranged itself. He grabbed the back of the closest chair at the table and squeezed until the edge of the wood bit painfully into the pads of his fingers.

They got to the same answer at the same time.

“Was she meeting up with Emma?” Donna asked. “Did she mention that to you?”

“Fuck!” he screamed, and pulled the chair to slam down into the floor. “No!”

Donna had gone white and rigid. He breathed deep and smiled, but it landed like a slap and she recoiled from him.

“It’s okay. It’ll be okay.” He took her phone. “Let me take this. I’ll go get her.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Carly knew the word impulse mostly as a concept, but also as a vocab word in English. It had only been a short time that she’d thought of it as anything self-descriptive. She was the good one, the one who used her head. She was careful. She was courteous, which was only another kind of careful. She was the kid who still asked permission for sweet snacks at home, the one who always said please.

No one ever used the word impulse and meant it as a good thing. What was accomplished impulsively was a cautionary tale. Bad. Sometimes ruinous.

But to Carly, the idea of it had gotten hooked to the pulse syllable of the word. Impulse. A lurch of the heart that set something off like a starting gun. The thing was, starting guns were never aimed and they weren’t guides. Just bang and you’re off, and therein seemed to lie the problem.

When she’d seen the video of the thing, the one element she could solidly match up to the unclear memory was the pounding of her heart and the way it had somersaulted in her chest just before she’d flipped the whole scene to her advantage. She did remember the leap of NO! under her sternum, and the yank of the impulse that had spurred her to do what she did. And it had worked.

After that one moment, all-head Carly, Miss Please and Thank You of the Twenty-First Century, wondered if impulses were always bad, if they always led to trouble. Now she had precedent.

She was shocked by all she hadn’t talked herself out of lately.