Chapter 10: The Voice Memo

We listened in the family lounge at the end of the hall, with the door shut and Tegan's cast propped on a footstool.

Drew had brought a charger cable from his truck and plugged her cracked phone in.

He set the phone on the coffee table between us, and Tegan pressed play from the beginning.

For the first minute it was only wind.

It roared across the microphone in long, ugly gusts, and under it came the scrape of shoes on gravel.

Then a voice I knew very well.

"Stay in a line, everybody. Hold the shoulder of the person in front of you."

"That's Keeley," Tegan said quietly.

"Is that Tegan?" Brent's voice said. "Why's she so far back?"

"I can't see, Keeley," a thinner voice said, close to the microphone. "I can't see my own hand."

"You're fine. Keep going."

I looked at Tegan, and she looked at the floor.

The recording ran on for four minutes of walking and coughing, and Keeley reading out the distance from her phone.

"Eight tenths left," she said. "We're basically there."

I counted what I knew.

She had been wrong by nearly a mile and had not said so.

Then the wind dropped a little, and Brent's voice came in close and low.

"Keeley. Did Keira actually say we should go?"

I did not move.

"No," Keeley said.

"Then why did you post it?"

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