The water was cold, and Susan clawed at it, trying to keep her chin above the surface. It was dark and she couldn’t see anything. She didn’t even know which way the current was taking her. The river water tasted like mud and metal. All her life she had been told not to drink water from the Willamette, that it was polluted with mercury and sewage and radioactive runoff from Hanford. Now she’d probably swallowed a keg of it. If she didn’t drown, she’d die of cancer.

Most people who were drowning didn’t cry out for help. They were too busy trying to breathe.

It’s not like you see on TV.

It’s silent.

People just slip under the surface, and are gone.

Sticks and debris snapped against her legs, focusing her mind like a slap in the face. The river groaned and roared. It was the only sound.

Her body burned with exhaustion.

It took everything she had to take that last breath. She could have held it. Bought herself another few minutes. But she’d never been the type of person to go quietly. So she yelled. That whole lungful of sweet oxygen—she let it go in one word. “Archie.” It rang in her head as loud and clear as a bell, but she wasn’t even sure she’d said it out loud. His name echoed in her brain, fading into a mantra as she sank below the waterline.

Archie.

It took her a split second to realize she was underwater. It was quiet, the roar of the river a distant hum.

She stretched a hand up and managed to find the cold night air with the tips of her fingers, but she had no leverage, no way to push herself above the water. She could feel her body panic, like a spark bursting into flame, and she inhaled water, a great cold gulp of it. She choked, and it hurt. But she couldn’t stop. She inhaled more of it.

Her brain wasn’t working. She searched sloppily for some sentence to hang on to.

The second stage. The epiglottis sealed the airway. The body’s way of protecting the lungs from filling up with water.

She was calm now, and so tired. The water carrying her. It was a relief to stop fighting it, to let her body rest.

She wasn’t cold anymore.

She thought of her dad, dying in his hospital bed, and how in the end, after all those months of fighting, dying had seemed peaceful.

She thought of her mom, and how pissed off she would be by this.

What was the third stage? Unconsciousness. It would happen soon, and then she would go into cardiac arrest. Her heart would stop. She would be clinically dead. It wouldn’t hurt. She’d be asleep.

Four minutes.