Carly walked away from them, the pieces of the painting nearly weightless in her grasp, as if some essential thing had poured out when it cracked in two. Like it was hollow now.

All this trouble for something so breakable.

But what little weight there was, even in two pieces, had served as an anchor. As soon as she put it in the car, nothing held her to her place. The responsibility of carrying something so precious had been a distraction that kept all the other thoughts away. She had allowed it to do that. She’d bent all of her concentration on it.

But when she closed the door of Owen’s pretty car, there was nothing. Or more precisely, there was everything. Carly ran.

Her right knee had been at the top of its pistoning stroke when the first gunshot split the air. A second later when she was skimming the ground, her feet switching places midleap between the footfalls, another sharp crash broke over the noise of the rush and thud of her sprint.

She skidded to a stop, arms wheeling big circles to keep her from pitching over.

She listened. Nothing. If the shots missed, no one was yelling about it. If the shots landed, no one was in pain to cry over it.

She ran faster.

She’d covered most of a mile by the time she heard tires rolling, faint in her wake, the engine hum growing louder as it came closer. Carly wanted nothing more than to be invisible. Other Carly took the reins and made that happen.

She veered off the edge of the dirt track into the trees. She watched the road from behind the trunk of a stout pine. Ridiculous. Cartoony. Life imitating art imitating life. She could almost hear Marcelline saying it.

Carly was supposed to wait for Owen. He was coming to get her. That’s what she’d agreed to. The yes had made sense at the time. The yes allowed her to leave a situation that she desperately wanted to be away from. Yes to a man with a gun in his hand, before the reality of that gun had blasted a hole into the quiet.

Now the thought of seeing Owen made her want to scream.

But it was John’s red car that crawled into view. Carly couldn’t breathe. If it was John, then who didn’t scream at the gunshots? The two gunshots? There were only two other people. How?

The car picked up speed and Carly tried to shift with the motion of it to stay completely hidden behind the bole of the tree. As the car drew even with her, she risked a peek. It wasn’t John at the wheel.

Marcelline was sobbing, not even trying not to, and driving away. Leaving her.