Chapter 1 — The Last Thing He Said

“Don’t bother with the door, Marlowe.

It’s too late for you.”

Those were the last words my husband said to me before he climbed out through the driver’s window and left me and my brother in a car that was filling with cold bay water.

I am not going to walk you through the next few minutes second by second.

I lived them, and my brother lived them, and neither of us needs them narrated for the sake of a good scene.

So I will tell you the shape of it and no more.

Callum had driven us off the coastal road, through the guardrail, into the tidal estuary below — a thing he made look, in the half-second before it happened, like a loss of control.

It was not a loss of control.

When the water reached my lap and I clawed at my seatbelt and it would not release, I got my fingers under the buckle and felt what was there: a length of heavy-gauge wire, wrapping the mechanism to the steel frame of the seat, binding me into a sinking car as neatly as a knot.

That was the moment the last three years of my life rearranged themselves into their true shape.

No accident bolts a woman into her seat with wire beforehand.

My husband had not lost control of anything.

He had planned every inch of this, and he had climbed out and swum away, and he had left me and my brother — my brother, who could not walk, who had not walked in fifteen years — to drown in the dark.

I have told this part of the story out loud only a handful of times, and each time I have made the same choice I’m making now: to say what happened without lingering in it.

There are people who want the water described — how it felt, how long it took, how close it came.

I understand the impulse and I will not feed it.

What was done to me and my brother in that car was not a scene for anyone’s entertainment; it was the worst few minutes of two people’s lives, and those minutes belong to us.