I slid the contract back in the envelope. “Take it with you,” I instructed, handing it to Evan. I had asked my lawyer to handle sensitive situations in the past, but none as fraught as this. I was a highly visible person in a highly visible industry. If the details of this incident got out, my life would be decimated. Because as bad as things seemed, the truth was even worse. And Evan knew I would risk everything to keep it hidden.
“What now?” I asked as he snugged the envelope into his briefcase.
“We move on,” he said simply.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Because of course we should move on, but in my heart, I knew I never could.
SAVANNAH
Three months ago
I’d never been in a police car before.
The seats were super uncomfortable, you had to sit straight up like you were in church. It smelled like unwashed armpits and barf, and I wondered how many people had thrown up back here. A few months back, a girl at school drank a fifth of whiskey as a dare, but she left in an ambulance, so it must have been someone else’s bad day I was smelling.
There was a cage between the driver and me that reminded me of our fire escape at home, with its tic-tac-toe metalwork and holes barely large enough to stick a finger through. Our fire escape was the closest thing we’d ever had to a balcony. I liked to sit out there at night and watch the cars go by, squinting at them to blur their lights into a psychedelic swirl of color. But I wasn’t on my fire escape. I was in the back of a police car on my way to the hospital, to hold the hand of my one remaining parent.
“You OK back there?” the cop asked me, craning his neck to look for himself.
“Yes,” I said, though I really wasn’t. I don’t know how long I’d sobbed at my locker before Mr. Price peeled me off him, but by the time he’d slid me into the police car, I had cried myself dry.
I replayed Mr. Price’s pronouncement in my head. “Your parents were in an accident.” He paused, then said something completely nonsensical. “Unfortunately your dad didn’t make it.” For a few seconds I genuinely didn’t understand. What Mr. Price was saying was impossible. My dad couldn’t be dead. I’d seen him just that morning, drinking his coffee out of the #1 DAD! mug I had bought for half price the day after Father’s Day. Dad was a big coffee drinker. He brewed a whole pot every morning and drank it black and crazy hot. They didn’t have cream and sugar at his outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, where he’d had his first cup, and I guess he came to like it that way. As for why he drank it so hot, I really couldn’t tell you.
“We need to talk about your birthday,” he had said when I sat down at the kitchen table for breakfast that morning. “It’s your sweet sixteen, we need to do something special.”
“I know something special we can do,” I’d responded, and he shut me up with a look.
“We’re not buying you a car,” he’d admonished, and I probably rolled my eyes, like I always did when I didn’t get my way. And then that was it. I left for school. I’m not even sure I said goodbye.
And now Mr. Price was saying he was dead? How was that possible? We hadn’t even finished our conversation. I never expected Dad to buy me a new car, but it didn’t stop me from pestering him. He had already hinted I would be getting the Cherokee, and Mom would get something new and cute, like a MINI Cooper or a cabriolet. I had learned to drive in that Jeep. I even made it my own with a few well-placed dings on the bumper （Bumpers are for bumping!）。 After I scraped the dumpster behind our building for the third time （It was wider than it looked!）， Dad installed a dashcam so he could analyze my every mistake. It wasn’t enough that I had to listen to him in the car beside me （Signal before you turn! Stop behind the line!）， he wanted to scrutinize my driving in our living room, too.
We put the dashcam app on my phone. Dad said it was because my phone was newer and had more memory than his, but I think he just wanted an excuse to peek in on my social life—see who I was texting, at what time and why. We had, in fact, never looked at the dashcam stream, I wasn’t even sure it worked.
“I’ll go in with you when we get to the hospital,” the cop said, “to make sure they take you straight to your mom, OK?” I nodded. I was sure I could have found her myself, but I wasn’t about to say no to a cop.
“She’s going to be OK,” he said. “The driver nicked her pretty good, but from what I saw, her injuries aren’t life-threatening.”