But she couldn’t figure out how to tell Ryan.
(“I thought maybe I’d be in love like Hailey,” she said. “Like the girls at school. But it wasn’t ever like that. It was just a thing I was trying.”) The call came while she was at Lacey’s party, pedicures under way, rows of girls with their toes turned in, red and crackled and deformed.
Skip the party, he said. Can you sneak the car out again?
She’d said she couldn’t. She didn’t want to do that anymore. My dad knows, she kept telling him. I have to stop.
It’s important, he said, and Devon snuck into one of the Weaver bedrooms, Lacey’s party-favor wrappers strewn across the floor. It was hard to hear him because he was outside, he was walking on the road. I won’t have my car. I need to see you.
And he told her he’d just ended things with Hailey. It wasn’t fair to her, what they were doing.
It’s someone else, Hailey had said, and she was very angry and very loud.
He’d told her no, but he didn’t think she believed him. He’d driven her home in her car, and now he was walking and he wondered if it was time to tell her the truth, tell everyone.
That he and Devon were in love, and it was real, and they weren’t ashamed. (But I don’t love you, she thought, and it’s not real, and I am ashamed.) And that neither of them cared about the consequences.
The panic in her chest, like a bird trapped there, flapping.
But he said she was just scared and not to worry.
Pick me up at our spot. Ash Road.
A spot that mattered to him, the spot he’d seen her running that time and given her a ride. It’s dangerous here, he’d said. Jesus, you could die.
Meet me, he said. It’ll all be okay.
It was like his hands were closing around her neck.
Everyone would know. Coach T. would never forgive her. Everything would be over.
Slipping out of the Weaver house, past the laughing girls, half of them singing, voices lifting to the rafters, their feet tapping under tables, the pink pulsating karaoke machine humming at their painted feet, she was gone.
She was gone, and no one saw.
Running the mile home, her chest tight and punishing, she couldn’t get there fast enough.
Except Drew was in the garage, doing something with his science project. And he was always trying to catch her.
Hiding behind the tool bench, she waited until he left, then grabbed Dad’s keys on the hook just inside the kitchen door. She’d only done it three times before, and once she’d had to stop to figure out how to turn on the headlights.
She wasn’t thinking as she drove there. She couldn’t make her brain stop whirring long enough to think.
The sign seemed to jump out at her: Ash Road.
They were both sitting up now, Devon taking little breaths.
“Mom, it happened so fast,” she finally said, her voice small as when she was a child having a nightmare. The kind when even after Katie thought she’d wakened her she could tell Devon was still seeing it, her eyes dancing under her lids.
“You can tell me,” Katie said, grabbing for her hand.
“It was darker than it had ever been before,” Devon said, shaking her head. “I couldn’t tell where the road ended and the rest began. I didn’t know how to make the lights go bright enough.”
“Oh, honey,” Katie said.
Devon leaned against her arm, her mouth inches from her mother’s ear.
“Suddenly, he was there,” Devon said. “And I didn’t turn the wheel fast enough.”
A rush of feelings came, every feeling all at once, Katie’s stomach turning.
“My foot never…it was so fast and then it was too late,” Devon said. “I don’t even remember getting home.”
“Oh, Devon.”
“Mom, I swear, it was darker than it had ever been.”
They didn’t say anything, or even move, for what felt like a long time.
“You were lying, then,” Katie said, finally. “About Hailey’s texts, her calls, the things she said. You let me believe your dad…”
“I’m a murderer,” Devon said, the words so big neither of them could speak for a moment.
Katie couldn’t order her thoughts. None of it seemed real, the comforter bunching in her hands. But she knew whatever she said next would decide the course of everything.
“You’re not a murderer,” she said, the words soft in her mouth. “That’s not what it is.”
“Mom, I am. I just kept going. I didn’t stop, I didn’t do anything. I froze. I—”
“No,” Katie said, a growing force in her voice. “It was an accident. It was a terrible accident. There are accidents, and we can’t always stop them, and it’s no one’s fault,”
“It is my fault. I’m a monster,” she said, turning, her face so old Katie didn’t recognize it. Small and stretched and old. “Because I’m not sorry enough. I missed him, but I’m free. He might have taken it all away. I—”
“That’s not true,” Katie interrupted. “I know it’s complicated, but you really don’t—”