Chapter 6: Nineteen Seconds

I played it with Bram standing behind my chair.

I didn't ask him to stay, and he didn't ask if he could.

The speaker crackled, and wind and water roared out of it.

Then a young man's voice, out of breath, laughing a little the way people do when they are scared.

"Cor, it's me. Don't be mad."

I knew that voice.

I had not heard it in eight years.

"We took the boat out and Morven went over the side. She can't swim, she's in the middle of the lake, I'm going in after her."

A splash sounded close to the phone, and another sound, a woman's thin cry.

"Flick is on the dock. She's frozen, Cor, she won't even grab the rope. I'll get Morven to the ring and then I'll..."

A cough, then a breath.

"Just come. If I don't make it, tell Morven it wasn't her fault. And tell Flick I love her."

The message ended.

Twenty seconds.

The kitchen was very quiet.

I put both hands flat on the table, the good one and the splinted one, and looked at the dark screen.

Kai had said it himself, in his own voice, with the lake behind him.

I pulled the phone toward me and saved the file in two places before I let myself breathe.

"It wasn't me," I said.

My voice sounded small.

"It was never me."

Bram's big hand settled on my shoulder, heavy as a blanket.

"No," he said. "It wasn't."

I started to cry, the real kind, the kind I hadn't done in front of anyone since I was nineteen.

I cried for Kai, who had been twenty and funny and had taught me to play poker with matchsticks.

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