Category: Fiction

CHAPTER 6: ELENA The highway stretched out ahead of me, empty and dark. Three hours to Millbrook. Three hours of nothing but white lines and my own thoughts. I cranked the heat up even though I wasn’t cold, gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white, and drove. My phone sat dark on the

CHAPTER 5: ELENA Matt lowered the phone and his thumb hit the red button, cutting Angela off mid-sentence. The silence that followed pressed in from every direction, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator and the uneven hitch of his breathing. “That was rude,” I said. “She seemed upset.” His eyes flicked to mine,

CHAPTER 4: ELENA Iwas twelve the first time I watched something die that I desperately wanted to save. The mare had caught her leg in the fence, the old barbed wire my father had been meaning to replace for months biting deep into her skin. By the time we found her that morning, the sun

CHAPTER 3: ELENA Idrove on autopilot, taking the route home I’d driven a thousand times before. Past the gas station where Matt always stopped for coffee on Sunday mornings. Past the Italian place where we’d celebrated our first anniversary. Past the dry cleaner that never got his uniform shirts quite right. The flash drive felt

CHAPTER 2: ELENA Iwas on the bathroom floor when my body finally caught up to what my brain had seen. The tile was cold against my knees, and I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, tasting bile and something sharper. Maybe it was panic. Or, maybe, the metallic tang of a life

CHAPTER 1: ELENA Iput down a dog that afternoon. She was an old shepherd mix whose hips had given up on her long before her heart did, and her owner held her the way you hold something you know you’re about to lose. I see this often enough to know what comes next, to be