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Back We're All in This Together Save as PDF
Chapters (46)
  1. Cover
  2. Other Titles
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Friday
  7. ONE
  8. TWO
  9. THREE
  10. FOUR
  11. Saturday
  12. FIVE
  13. SIX
  14. SEVEN
  15. EIGHT
  16. NINE
  17. TEN
  18. Sunday
  19. ELEVEN
  20. TWELVE
  21. THIRTEEN
  22. FOURTEEN
  23. FIFTEEN
  24. SIXTEEN
  25. SEVENTEEN
  26. EIGHTEEN
  27. NINETEEN
  28. TWENTY
  29. TWENTY-ONE
  30. TWENTY-TWO
  31. TWENTY-THREE
  32. TWENTY-FOUR
  33. TWENTY-FIVE
  34. Monday
  35. TWENTY-SIX
  36. TWENTY-SEVEN
  37. TWENTY-EIGHT
  38. TWENTY-NINE
  39. THIRTY
  40. THIRTY-ONE
  41. THIRTY-TWO
  42. THIRTY-THREE
  43. THIRTY-FOUR
  44. THIRTY-FIVE
  45. EPILOGUE
  46. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“I’m sorry, Nicki, I had other things on my mind.”

“Right. And even when she went missing, you didn’t think to mention it?”

“I said I was sorry! Can we just move on and figure out a plan? We need to go to Duluth.”

“We are not going anywhere,” Nicki says, her voice like an ice pick. “I’m going to go to Duluth and try to stop my daughter from being kidnapped by some dirty criminal. You can go wherever the fuck you want.” The line goes dead.

“Right,” says Finn, slamming her phone down on the passenger seat. She should know better by now. No matter how many times she tries to do the right thing, it will never balance out the millions of times she has done the wrong thing. It’s strange how, once she made the decision to come home, she thought it was her family who was going to have to fight to win her back. It never occurred to her that it would actually be the other way around.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Anastasia sits in her kitchen, watching the video of London’s grandmother going over the falls in slow motion on her laptop. The video, the one that has been on everyone’s feed since Friday, is of very poor quality, and was probably filmed by some skid named Terrance from Murillo on a cracked-screen iPhone 4. If it had been Anastasia’s footage, she would have run it through some editing software, or at least applied an Instagram filter, added some background music, some swelling strings – Mozart, or maybe Lana Del Rey.

Terrance had been standing on the first platform on the eastern side of the Kam River, the one where everyone goes to have their pictures taken with the pretty view of the falls in the background when they can’t be bothered to walk farther than twenty feet from their car. And janky-ass Terry, there with a woman who Anastasia can only assume is both his wife and also his sister, just happened to end up right in the optimum spot to watch Granny’s big plunge. Had a current come along and pushed Granny over to the other side of the falls, Terrance would have been SOL, too far away from the action to get any kind of shot. But her man T has some kind of horseshoe up his ass. Granny’s barrel stayed on course, and she plunged over the eastern flume towards her destiny of broken bones and internet fame. And T-Bone, the fortuitous hillbilly, the chosen one, got the ultimate money shot.

The drop. The bang. The flip.

“Holy shit,” says Terrance, giving censors all around the world a heart attack. “That was a lady in a motherfucking barrel.”