“Of course my head is not in the right place, Chris. If it were, I wouldn’t be doing this. And if we don’t do it soon, I’ll lose my nerve. So let’s get this show on the road.”

Christine nodded. “Okay. You’ve got this.”

Christine backed away from the minivan, stuck her fingers between her lips, and whistled. It was an ear-splitting screech that echoed off the walls of the cavernous aquatics center.

“Let’s roll!”

A loud buzzing filled the indoor plaza as the crane’s hydraulics activated and jolted the platform, and the minivan parked on it, upward. Avery grabbed the steering wheel and white-knuckled it as if she were driving through a torrential downpour. She rolled up the window and the noise outside the vehicle—the producers yelling instructions, the engineers guiding the crane operator, the ring of the hydraulics, and the murmurs from three hundred spectators that filled the retractable bleachers and made up the studio audience—went silent. All she heard now was her own exaggerated breathing. Even the smell of chlorine disappeared.

Her ascent finally ended, and then the car jolted again as the back of the platform started to rise, pitching the nose of the minivan downward toward the water. A slew of engineers who consulted on the stunt had decided that thirty-eight degrees was the most accurate pitch angle to best represent a vehicle careening off the road and plunging into a body of water. To Avery it felt like she was hanging vertically off a cliff. The seat belt was tight across her chest as gravity pulled her forward. She straightened her legs on the floorboard to keep her position in the driver’s seat.