Six months previously

October

LISTEN.

“No.”

Listen.

“I don’t want to hear.” She kept her eyes down, staring at her bare feet. Her toenails were painted pink. Only not here. Here, they were gray, like everything else.

Everything except the blood. The blood was always red.

She had forgotten that.

You have to listen to us.

“No, I don’t. Not anymore.”

We can help you.

“No one can help me. Not to do that, what you’re asking me to do. It’s impossible.” At the edge of her vision, she saw the blood creeping toward her and immediately took a step backward. Then another. “I can’t go back now. I can never go back.”

Yes. You can. You have to.

“I was at peace. Why didn’t you leave me there?” She felt something solid and hard against her back and pressed herself against it, her gaze still on her toes, so much of her awareness on the blood inching ever closer.

Because it isn’t finished,

“It was finished a long time ago.”

Not for you. Not for her.

Present day

April 8

Tennessee

CASE EDGERTON RAN along the narrow trail, aware of his burning legs but concentrating on his breathing. The last mile was always the hardest, especially on his weekly trail run. Easier to just zone out and run when he was on the track or in his neighborhood park; this kind of running, with its uneven terrain and various hazards, required real concentration.

That was why he liked it.

He jumped over a rotted fallen log and almost immediately had to duck a low-hanging branch. After that, it was all downhill—which wasn’t as easy as it sounded, since the trail snaked back and forth in hairpin curves all along the middle quarter of this last mile. Good training for his upcoming race. He planned to win that one, as he had won so many his entire senior year.