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EMMA’S FEET START taking her around the room again as she loses herself in another conversation with her dead sister. “Did you hear that? I tried, with Dad,” she says. “I wonder if you did too.”

She pauses at the motel door and peers out the peephole. The afternoon sun glints off the cars in the parking lot. A pair of pigeons squabbles over what looks like the remains of a Big Mac. They’re probably going to die from blocked arteries.

“I know you were hurting,” Emma goes on.

“I know you felt like there was nothing to look forward to. But when did you decide that life was too much? And did you have doubts? Did you drive back and forth on that road, trying to work up the courage to twist the steering wheel? What was it like? How did you finally make that turn?”

A lump rises in her throat. It’s as familiar as it is painful. She keeps talking.

“I’ve read about people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. They say the second they let go of the railing, they knew they’d made a mistake.” She shudders when she imagines that long, terrible plunge.

“But you had a chance to undo that first mistake. You crashed your car into the pole, but it didn’t kill you.

You could’ve survived. You could’ve changed your mind.

But when the car caught fire, you stayed inside it.

‘There was no indication that the victim tried to escape.’ That’s the worst part of it for me.

Knowing that you made the decision to die not once, but twice. ”

And then she’s crying too hard to talk anymore.

Claire is the only one who can help her. Except the verb should be past tense.

Claire was the only person who could help her. From now on, she’s on her own.