Chapter 4: Quarry Road

I shook my head and held up the badge on my chest.

Then I touched my throat and shrugged, a cleaner who had never said a word and never would.

Blythe watched me for one more second.

"Of course," she said. "I'm sorry. What a silly thing to ask."

She patted my arm and walked back up the corridor, and her heels did not hurry.

I stood with the rag in my hand until the lift doors closed behind her.

Then I walked out of the basement and found Heidi behind the ambulance bay with her phone lit up in her hand.

She read my face and said, "What did she do?"

I wrote it on the screen with my thumb.

SHE TALKED TO MY BODY. SAID I WAS SUPPOSED TO STAY GONE.

Heidi read it twice.

"That's not enough for the police," she said. "That's enough for me. Get in the car."

Her hatchback had one door a different color from the others, and the heater smelled of burnt toast.

She drove the whole way with both hands high on the wheel and talked, because she was scared.

"I've been an intern for four months. I have a loan the size of a mortgage. If someone from admin asks, we're getting tacos."

I wrote on the phone: ARE YOU OKAY?

"No," Heidi said. "Left here?"

I nodded.

Quarry Road had no streetlights.

I knew the turn before she did.

My body knew it, even in Hattie's skin, and my stomach pulled tight.

"That one," I wrote. "The green door."

Heidi cut the lights and rolled the last hundred yards on the gravel.

The cabin sat in a shallow dip with a rusted truck bed out front and the door painted a bright, cheap green.

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