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I couldn’t feel the temperature drop as the sun set in the hills around me.
But I could feel this, and as the soda bottle burst I watched the car come around the curve in the road, toward me.
The driver was a woman in her twenties. Hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun. A “coexist” bumper sticker was peeling off the front of her beat-up Jeep. Her lips were moving, like she was singing. But her eyes were sad.
“Stop,” I screamed as I watched her eyes flick to the barely noticeable fork in the road ahead, where the shoulder of the road dipped then branched into the sorry excuse for a road. Where my bones were slowly becoming part of the earth.
The girl with the messy bun drove through me and my tidal wave of feelings, crashing invisibly around us both.
“Please stop,” I whispered as the despair crashed harder.
And then, even though I couldn’t quite believe it was happening, she did.
11. BRECIA
Boulder, Colorado
2 years before
He got ready for his date while April took the girls to McDonald’s for dinner.
“Bye, Daddy!” Kimmie called as she and Emma skipped down the hall toward the garage door.
He popped his head out of the bathroom, where he’d been shaving. Then he lifted his hands above his head and growled. “You’d better get in your booster seats before the tickle monster can catch you!”
Kimmie and Emma squealed with delight, and April laughed as he chased the girls out the door and caught them in his arms when the wall of labeled boxes blocked their path, tickling them both until they begged him to stop and promised to eat all of their Happy Meals.
I watched in disbelief.
Grudgingly, I admitted to myself that I understood a little better why April didn’t know.
Because if I didn’t know what he had done—100% for sure, because well, here I was—I never really would have believed he was capable of hurting someone.
It made it worse, somehow. That he could be the tickle monster and the monster waiting with an extension cord in my side yard at the same time.
I wanted him to be one or the other. Not both.
When the garage door had shut and the house was silent, he opened his phone and turned his music up loud. A playlist called “60s party.”
Neil Sedaka.
Roy Orbison.
Paul Anka.
Again, not what I would have expected. Metallica, yes. Korn, definitely. But peppy 60s hits? I watched his eyes as he tapped a razor on the side of the sink and ran a hand over his freshly shaven face, then practiced his smile in the mirror.
Satisfied, he checked his in-app messages—nothing new from Nicole—and grabbed the keys to the blue Kia in the garage.
But as his fingers closed around the doorknob, he suddenly shook his head and turned around.
I followed him downstairs and into his basement office, where he opened the latched top drawer of his desk and pulled out two containers of Tic Tacs.
He opened one of the containers and tapped a few white capsules into the mostly full second container.
I took a few steps closer to get a better look. He whistled “Pretty Woman” as he closed the Tic Tac container, gave it a little shake, and inspected it from the side.
That’s when I realized that the capsules he had added weren’t shaped like the others. They were round and white instead of oblong and white. And they were scored down the middle.
