Katalina came closer. Not fast. She moved the way you'd move through a museum, stopping to look at something you'd paid good money to see.
She crouched down beside me, one hand braced on her knee for balance, her belly pressing against the wool of her coat. The fog wrapped around us both, close and wet, turning the rest of the cemetery into nothing but gray shapes and silence.
"I hired him three weeks ago," she said. Her voice was soft. Conversational. Like we were two friends catching up over coffee. "A man with a truck. He needed money. I needed someone who wouldn't ask questions. Your mother walked the same route every night after dinner. Route 9, right past the Fentons' old place. I went by a few days before, just to make sure. She was so sweet to me, Audrey. She told me all about her evening walks. How she liked the quiet."
I couldn't move. My hand was still on my mother's name, the granite cold and real under my palm, the only solid thing left in the world.
"It was quick," Katalina added. Almost kind. "The police said she didn't suffer. I made sure of that. I'm not a monster."
She watched my face. I felt her watching the way you feel a spider on your skin, patient and still, waiting to see what you'll do.
"She was asking questions," Katalina said. "Calling people. Your neighbor. Your doctor. She was going to ruin everything, Audrey. You have to understand. I built this. I spent years building it. Your husband. Your son. Your house. And you—" She shook her head, almost disappointed. "You should have just left when you had the chance."
She stood up. Brushed the damp grass off her knee. She looked down at me one more time, her face calm as glass, and then she pulled something small from her coat pocket. A phone. She tapped the screen twice.
The ground opened up.
That's what it felt like. Not an explosion. The ground just—opened, and sound became pressure, and pressure became heat, and heat became something that picked me up and threw me backward into the headstones like I weighed nothing at all.
I hit granite. My shoulder cracked against the edge of someone else's grave, and pain went through me sharp and white and total. I couldn't hear. I couldn't see anything but smoke and dirt and pieces of my mother's headstone scattered across the wet grass.
I tried to push myself up. My left arm wouldn't move right. Something warm ran down my side, soaking through my shirt, and when I looked down I saw red spreading fast across the fabric, darker than it should be, too much of it.
Through the smoke, I saw Katalina stumbling toward her car. She was clutching her stomach with both hands, her face twisted up, her mouth open. Even from here, even through the ringing in my ears, I could hear her. She was crying. Loud, wet, gasping sobs. The kind that carry.
She got into her car and pulled the door shut. I watched her take her phone out again, watched her press it to her ear. I couldn't hear what she said, but I could see her face in the window. She wasn't crying anymore.
I don't know how long I lay there. Long enough that the smoke started clearing. Long enough that I heard tires on gravel, fast, too fast, and then a car door slamming and footsteps running.
"Katalina!" Cassius's voice, raw and scared in a way I'd never heard it. "Katalina, where are you—"
He ran right past me.
I was on the ground ten feet from him, bleeding into the grass, and he ran past me like I was part of the landscape. Like I was another headstone.
He dropped to his knees beside her car. She was out now, leaning against the door, one hand pressed to her belly, her face pale and perfect and wet with tears. He pulled her into his arms and she collapsed against his chest, and I watched him hold her the way I used to imagine he'd hold me if something terrible ever happened.
"The baby," she whispered. I heard it clear across the cemetery. "Cassius, the baby—"
"You're okay," he said. "You're okay, I've got you."
He didn't look back. Not once.
I reached into my coat with my right hand. My fingers were shaking so hard I almost dropped it—the device, the one they gave me with the federal seal and the emergency frequency I wasn't supposed to use unless I had no other choice.
I had no other choice.
I pressed it to my ear. The ringing was still there, but underneath it I heard the tone, steady and cold and waiting.
"Designation Nightingale-7," I said. My voice came out steady. I don't know how. "Coordinates 47.6205 north, 122.3493 west. Cemetery off Route 9. I need extraction. Now."
The voice on the other end didn't ask questions. "Confirmed. Hold position. ETA forty minutes."
I let the device fall into the grass beside me. I looked up at the sky, gray and low and heavy with fog, and I counted my own heartbeat because it was the only thing left I could count on.
Forty minutes.
I made it thirty-eight before I heard the helicopter.
