She cut off the thought. Anxious possibilities spilled from her mind, impossible to claw back once they were free. Nathan at the bottom of a ladder with his neck twisted around. Nathan in the passenger seat of a car, so eager to leave he didn’t bother to pack. Nathan slumped in a chair with a hole in his skull, in the hall in a pool of blood, shirt stained dark—
She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. She should leave him alone. Give him space. She knew this. Except now those images were in her mind, and she could only spin through the same loop over and over again. He’s fine. Almost certainly fine. Except what if he isn’t?
She knew how this would go. She would sit on the couch, steeling herself unsuccessfully against panic, picking up one horrifying possibility after another and playing it through to its end. As if by working out the logistics of each fate, she could make it hurt less. The same thing seized her sometimes when he was even a few minutes late getting home from work. By the time he walked in through the door, she had worked out getting to the hospital or calling his parents to break the news, thought about where the life insurance documents were, imagined a rotating cast of doctors or police offers saying, “Ma’am, we’re sorry to have to tell you…”
Nathan always found it amusing. He laughed at her for the grand tragic scripts she wrote out in her head. But it wasn’t at all amusing to be inside of that relentless what-if. The only way she could bear it without panicking was to make those detailed plans.
“You could have just checked the app,” he would always tell her, and she would try to explain how that would mean she really was being overly anxious and spying on him to make herself feel better. So instead she fretted and pretended not to, and stopped asking him to text her if he was going to be late, because he always forgot anyway.
He wasn’t on the road and out of reach, though, he was thirty steps away, and she was being ridiculous. She would poke her head in. Say good morning. Say she was sorry, yet again, and hope that this time it was enough.
She put her phone away and arranged her face in an expression of what she hoped was only casual interest. She made herself walk unhurriedly out the door.
The lock on the carriage house door was undone, sitting on the step. She pulled the latch, swinging the heavy door open, and stood at the threshold. Dust swirled inside, lit by the slant of sunlight coming in; the interior was dim, and her eyes struggled to adjust. It had been decades since a horse or carriage had been inside this building, but two stalls remained to the far right. The rest of the space had been left open to store the actual carriages, but her father had converted it into a workshop, for those times when he decided that being a man meant cutting up pieces of wood and screwing them together in a different configuration. There were workbenches and a variety of tools set against the walls, including a table saw and a miter saw and other things that might have been worth a bit of money, if they were anything close to new or functional.
“Nathan?” she said. No answer. She could feel her pulse at her throat. “Nathan, are you in here?” she asked, though it was obvious that he wasn’t.
Then where was he? Where would he go without the car?
Unless someone picked him up, she thought, and chased that idea off into the shadows again.
There were footsteps in the dust, crisscrossing the floor. She followed them inside, lacking anything else useful to do. She stepped around the side of the big worktable in the center of the room, and she froze.
Nathan lay on the ground beside the worktable. His eyes were half-opened. One leg was twisted awkwardly under him where he had fallen. His T-shirt was stained dark, a single neat hole in the fabric at his chest. His face had a look of vague surprise.
Emma stared. All her time imagining the grim possibilities of fate, preparing herself for them to become reality, suddenly made it impossible to comprehend that this was, at last, real.
Nathan wasn’t dead. She was sitting on the couch, and in a moment he would walk in and tease her about it and ask how long she’d decided to wait after the funeral before starting to date again, and she would pretend to chuckle and the knot in her stomach would ease. Because it wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t. How utterly unlikely was it that one of those awful things she had imagined so many times would actually come true?
But she had always known they could.
She turned around, a ringing sound in her ears. She stumbled back into the open air, gulping down one breath after another that didn’t seem to be sufficient, and suddenly the world tipped and her vision filled with brightly colored lights that swarmed and swelled, and she felt her knees impact the drive, gravel digging into her palms that splayed against the ground.