Chapter 30: Mile Fourteen

The deputy kept Cora for two hours, and he was embarrassed the whole time.

She had four hundred alibis and a signed chairman's minute with a time on it.

The van had been stolen from the Delaney Labs lot that afternoon, and she told him so.

She gave him her keys and her statement.

He let her go at midnight, with an apology.

Ronan drove her back to the mill and held her until she slept.

Then he lay awake until the window turned gray, and slid out from under her arm at five.

He left a note on the pillow: Gone to see the road. Back by eight.

He drove the river road in the dark with the heater off.

He knew every bend of it.

He had driven it in his head every night since the morning they woke.

Mile fourteen was a long curve above the water, with a steel guardrail on the outside and an old stone bridge at the bottom.

He parked on the gravel shoulder, where the tow truck had left the glass.

The van was gone, but the rail was bent inward in a long white scar.

He got out and stood on the road.

Rain had fallen again in the night, and the asphalt was black and wet.

This was the place.

In the last life, her gray car had gone through the rail a hundred feet below this spot.

He had run down the bank in the rain, and knelt in the water, and her hand had been cold in his.

He waited for his own hands to shake.

They did not.

He looked at them, one at a time, the left one with the white tape on the wrist.

They were steady.

He had stopped being the man who knelt in the water, and nobody had told him.

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