Not tonight.
Kevin’s fingers were still wrapped in that tight ball. He wouldn’t raise that fist to her, but he gritted his teeth, his eyes narrowed and spitting a kind of wicked anger she had come to recognize.
“Leave me alone, Kevin.” She heard her own voice and it rang out loud, clear, and strong through the rain that night. “I’m done with you.”
As she sat in the car she searched her memory for the waver that must have been in her voice, for the shrinking fear she knew she must have felt. She turned around and Kevin reached for her, clamping a hand on her wrist. He squeezed, digging his fingernails into her flesh. She wouldn’t wince. She wouldn’t cry out.
“Don’t you dare run away from me,” he spat.
She shrugged him off violently. “I said leave me alone.”
He gave her a hard shove, but Sawyer kept her ground.
“Screw you, then!” he yelled to her back. “I don’t need you. I made you. No one knew who the hell you were until you started dating me, you little slut.”
Sawyer still felt the sting of those words as she clenched her jaw and hugged her backpack a little tighter, feeling the sharp edges of her books dig into her chest.
She heard the plink! and spritz of a beer being opened, then felt the whiz of the bottle as it soared past her left ear, leaving a spray of cold beer soaking her shoulder, dribbling down the naked skin on her throat and collar bone.
“I’m so done with you,” she said, surprised at the calm finality in her voice.
Kevin shrugged and took a pull on the beer he was holding. “Then what the hell are you still doing here?”
She felt the adrenaline in her legs even now as she remembered her slow jog away from Kevin, his beer bottles, and his car. The rain had started to let up, and she could hear the crinkle of leaves and twigs underfoot as she ran. She picked up speed and her hood slipped back. What remained of the drizzling, spitting rain rushed into her eyes, beer mixed with rain, and Sawyer kept running, kept going even when she heard Kevin’s tortured voice on the wind. “Sawyer!” he was yelling. “Sawyer, stop!”
“You’re way out there, aren’t you?”
“What?”
Detective Biggs jabbed a finger toward the rain-drenched windshield. “The housing development. It’s way out there, huh? I guess I didn’t realize it when we came out before.”
“We?”
“Officer Haas and me. He didn’t come in. He was handling some paperwork in the car.”
Sawyer remembered the fluorescent glow of Officer Haas’s cigarette as he lifted it to his lips when Sawyer drove up to her house.
“Oh.”
She paused, listened to her heart thrum out a metered beat. “Um.” Sawyer’s fingers started working the woven strap again on her backpack. “Detective Biggs? If someone—if something happened to someone and you—I mean, if I were to have…” Sawyer let her words trail off when the detective turned and smiled at her.
“Take a deep breath and start again.”
“I think I’m the reason why Kevin is dead.”
The words came out in a single, breathless string, and the second they were out, Sawyer desperately wished she could suck them back in. She stared straight ahead, eyes focused on the white dashes of the roadway, not daring to look at Detective Biggs.
“Were you in the car with Kevin?”
“No.”
Detective Biggs rubbed a big hand over his bald head, keeping one hand resting on the top of the steering wheel. He didn’t look at Sawyer. “Do you know where Kevin got the alcohol?”
Sawyer shook her head. “Not really. Sometimes he’d just take it from the fridge.”
“But you didn’t supply him with it.”
“No, sir. But I—I may have been the reason he was drinking.”
Detective Biggs put his other hand on the wheel, smoothly guiding the cruiser through the heavy iron gates of Blackwood Hills Estates. “Did you force him to drink the alcohol?”
“We were fighting. He was mad at me. I think that’s why he was drinking.” She licked her lips. “I’m sure that was why.”
A half smile cut across the detective’s face. “You didn’t force Kevin to get behind the wheel, Sawyer. You didn’t force him to drink and drive.” He looked at her, all amusement gone from his face. “That was his decision.”
Sawyer continued working the strap, her fingertips feeling raw from the course fabric. She wondered if she should mention the notes, mention the other reason she felt responsible for Kevin’s—and now Mr. Hanson’s?—death. She thought about the crumpled peanut oil wrapper stuffed in her jeans pocket, thought of the fact that regardless of what Detective Biggs said, if Sawyer hadn’t broken up with Kevin that night, he wouldn’t have been drinking, he wouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel of his car. He wouldn’t have died.
“I didn’t force anyone to do anything,” she mumbled.
***