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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

February 8, 2019

Agnes listens for Nora’s shower to come on. Then she’s up and out the front door. She stumbles through the snow and then she’s in the rental car, cranking the heat and watching the windshield fog over. She checks her phone, its signal straining to reach the Wi-Fi. By the time the whiteness clears, she knows where she’s going. She nudges the car out of the snowbank, along the tight circle of the driveway, and then she’s following the headlights through the tunnel of trees.

She wipes her eyes. There’s no moisture there, but she can’t seem to bring anything into focus. It doesn’t matter, though. The road is empty. She might as well be the last person on earth.

When she reaches the slick pavement of the highway, she flattens her foot on the accelerator, savoring the sense of freedom, of losing control, of moving beyond the point of thought. Where there is only survival.

In a matter of seconds, there’s the turnoff to town. She steers the car over, through the small streets. She parks in front of ása’s building and imagines ása there, drunk and hurt and lonely, an echo of her now. Agnes has never had any trouble understanding a suicide, has never quite believed it when someone said, I don’t know why they would do that. It’s a miracle when someone reaches the edge and doesn’t jump. It’s a feat of untold strength. The edge is the call of something wild and free and dark and promising. There is nothing inhuman, nothing mystical about following it.

She wishes she could have met ása. Wishes she could have helped her. She could have told her that no matter how promising the edge is, how satisfying it is to answer its call, there’s nothing, too. She’s sorry the woman chose to do it, chose to go, and that it happened when she was alone.

Agnes counts the buildings down the deserted street. There are lights in the windows, warm, glowing lives, but no one is outside at this hour, in this cold. Only Agnes, stalking the slippery pavement, searching for the correct building and then, when she finds it, the right apartment number. She buzzes. The door unlocks, fast, as though she’d unlocked it herself.

She doesn’t have to climb any stairs. The apartment is on the ground floor. The door opens for her before she even steps inside the hallway.