tunneled into the meat of the tree. Tanya screamed. Olivia blinked and stared at the gun in shock, as if realizing that she had actually fired.
‘Livvy, my God!’ Tanya screamed.
Ashlynn held up her hands. The burnt smell made her sick. ‘This isn’t like you, Olivia.’
Tears streaked Olivia’s pink face. ‘You don’t know anything about me.’
‘I know you’re better than this. You’re drunk, you’re upset. Let’s just get out of here. I won’t tell anyone.’
‘I don’t care what you do.’
Olivia opened the cylinder of the gun and shook gold cartridges onto the wet ground. She caught one cartridge in her palm and reinserted it in the cylinder. Her despair was etched in her face.
‘Do you know what Russian roulette is?’
‘
‘I want you to see what it feels like to have somebody play a game with
Ashlynn pleaded silently with Tanya.
‘Now it’s just you and me,’ Olivia said.
The revolver with the single cartridge in its chamber stared into Ashlynn’s face. Its barrel belched a wisp of smoke. Ashlynn looked into Olivia’s desperate eyes and understood exactly what was going on between the two of them. All of the hurt, loss, jealousy, bitterness, humiliation, frustration, and anger of the past three years had converged on this moment. It was Kimberly dying. It was the lawsuit failing. It was the tit-for-tat violence that had erupted between the two towns over the past year. Olivia had found someone to take the fall for everything she’d suffered. She blamed Ashlynn.
But it was more than that, too.
‘I know what this is about,’ Ashlynn told her.
Olivia’s hands shook like autumn leaves. ‘On three,’ she said.
‘Don’t you want to talk about it?’
‘On three,’ the girl repeated, pretending to ignore her.
‘Olivia, listen, I need to tell you something,’ Ashlynn said.
‘Shut up.’
‘Please, it’s important.’
‘
Ashlynn closed her eyes and said nothing more. It didn’t matter now. She had a one-in-six chance of dying as the other girl squeezed the trigger, but she didn’t care. She really didn’t. Part of her was already dead.
She heard Olivia breathing. Crying. Counting.
One.
Two.
Thr—.
PART ONE
UNBEARABLE
1
Christopher Hawk drove west on Highway 7 into the emptiness of rural Minnesota, leaving civilization behind him with each mile away from the city. Staring at the horizon between his windshield wipers, he could have sworn the world was flat, and he hoped there was a sign ahead to warn him before he sped off the edge of the earth. Long, empty miles loomed between towns. There were no buildings, other than the occasional desolate farm. He drove beside endless fields ruled by King Corn, but it was too early for planting season, and the land resembled a rutted moonscape. He didn’t feel welcome.
The weather made it worse. March was going out like a lamb, freakishly warm and wet. It had started raining almost as soon as he cleared the western edge of I-494, and the dreary spattering had continued nonstop for nearly two hours and a hundred miles. He passed swollen drainage ditches where the water looked ready to spill across the lanes of the highway. The bumpy gray clouds were like a thick hood thrown over his head.
An amateur billboard mounted in the midst of farmland caught his eye. The message had been painted in bold black letters on a plain white background. It said:
I AM COMING SOON. ARE YOU READY?
The message was signed, ‘Jesus.’
Chris didn’t think he belonged in a place where God felt the need to advertise. Even so, when he asked himself if he was ready, the answer was easy. No. He wasn’t ready at all. He was nervous about this journey, because he was on his way back into the lives of two strangers.
The first was his ex-wife. The second was his daughter.
That morning, Hannah had called at six o’clock, waking him up. He hadn’t spoken to her in months, but he could see her face as clearly as if she’d been sleeping beside him. There were still days when he reached for her in bed, hoping to take her hand, hoping to fold her against his body. He still had dreams where the three of them lived together as a family. Chris. Hannah. Olivia.
She didn’t give him a chance to dream.
‘Our daughter has been arrested for murder,’ she announced.
Just like that. No small talk. Hannah never wasted time. She had a way of cutting to the chase, whether it was in college when he wanted to sleep with her (she said yes), or three years ago when she wanted a divorce (he said no, but that didn’t change her mind).
Olivia.
Chris didn’t ask for details about the crime she had supposedly committed. He didn’t want to know the victim’s name, or what happened, or hear Hannah reassure him that she was really innocent. For him, that wasn’t even a question. His daughter didn’t do it. Not Olivia. The girl who texted and tweeted him every day –
‘I’ll be there this afternoon,’ he replied.
The silence on the phone told him that his answer surprised her. Finally, Hannah said, ‘She needs a lawyer, Chris.’
‘I’m a lawyer.’
‘You know what I mean. A criminal lawyer.’
‘All lawyers are criminals.’
It was an old joke between them, but Hannah didn’t laugh. ‘Chris, this is serious. I’m scared.’
‘I know you are, but this is obviously a misunderstanding. I’ll straighten it out with the police.’
Her hesitation felt like a punch to the gut. ‘I’m not so sure that’s all it is,’ she said. She was silent again, and then she added, ‘It’s ugly. Olivia’s in trouble.’
Hannah sketched out the facts for him, and he realized that she was right. It was ugly. In the early hours of Saturday morning, a pretty teenage girl had been shot to death, and Olivia had been at the scene, drunk, desperate, pointing a gun at the girl’s head. It hadn’t taken long – it was Tuesday now – for the police to conclude that his daughter was guilty.
‘What did Olivia tell you?’ he asked. ‘What happened between them?’
‘She won’t talk to me. She said I should call you.’
