Instead of answering, she releases me, knowing I’m not going anywhere. In a flash, she’s beside the man in the grass. He lies on his side, an arm flung out behind him and the other curled inward.

I can’t look at his face but can’t help but look at his face. What’s left of it. His eyes are swollen shut. His broken nose seeps blood darker than the rest of his blood. He doesn’t move. Sam pushes two fingers into the slick of blood at his neck, seeking a pulse. Worry creases her face.

“Sam?” I say as dizziness and fear and shock somersault through me. “He’s still alive, right?”

My vision blurs, Sam and the maybe-dead man veering in and out of focus.

“Right?”

Sam says nothing. Not when she runs her jacket sleeve across the spot she touched on the man’s neck, erasing the indentation of her fingers. Not when she snaps up the knife lying in the grass and drops it into her pocket. Not even when she drags me from the scene, unable to look at me as I wail, “What did I do, Sam? What did I do?”

CHAPTER 19

We move quickly, a pair of fugitives hurtling through the darkness. Sam’s thrown her jacket over my shoulders, her hand pressing the small of my back, pushing me forward. I keep going because I have to. Because Sam won’t let me stop, even though all I want to do is collapse onto the ground and stay there.

Breathing has become a chore. Each intake of air is hampered by an anxious shudder. Each exhalation is accompanied by a sob. My chest expands from the lack of oxygen, my desperate lungs pushing themselves against my ribs.

“Stop,” I gasp. “Please. Let me stop.”

Sam ignores me, increases the pressure at my back, forces me onward. Past trees. Past statues. Past bums stretched across benches. When we come upon others—a man on a bike, a pair of joggers, three friends drunkenly walking arm in arm—she turns inward, shielding my blood-soaked body.

We stop only when we reach the Conservatory Water, that elaborate pool where in the daytime kids watch their toy sailboats traverse the shallow water. I’m guided to the pool’s edge, lowered to my knees, hands plunged into the water. Sam cleans me off as much as possible, splashing water onto my arms, my neck, my face. On the other side of the pool, a homeless man is doing the same thing to himself. When he stares at us, Sam yells, her voice skipping over the water.

“What the fuck are you looking at?”

The man backs away, grabbing his fistfuls of trash bags and disappearing in the darkness.

Sam dips a hand in the water, scooping liquid onto my forehead.

“Listen,” she says. “I think he’s still alive.”

I want to believe her, but I can’t let myself.

“No,” I say. “I killed him.”

“I felt a pulse.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “I’m sure.”

Relief pours over me, more cleansing than the water she continues to splash onto my bloodstained skin. I can breathe easier. My throat opens up, releasing another sob, this one grateful.

“We need to call for help,” I say.

Sam lowers my hands into the water again, rubbing them beneath her own, erasing the evidence of my sin. “We can’t do that, Quinn.”

“But he needs to get to a hospital.”

I try to pull my hands from the water but Sam holds them under.

“Calling 911 will get the police involved.”

“So?” I say. “I’ll tell them I was acting in self-defense.”

“And were you?”

“He had a knife.”

“Was he going to use it?”

I can’t answer that. Maybe he would have, eventually. Or maybe he would have walked away. I’ll never know.

“But he still had it,” I say, unsure of who I’m trying to convince, Sam or myself. “The police wouldn’t charge me if they knew that.”

Sam finally lifts my hands from the water, turning them over to see if any blood remains. It’s all gone. My palms are pale and glistening.

“They would if they knew our reason for being out here,” she says. “Especially if they knew we were trying to lure someone. Especially if they found out you could have gotten away.”

The only way she could know this is if she had been there. Hiding. Watching me the whole time. Watching even as the man’s knife dropped from his pocket. For a moment, that particular truth eclipses everything else.

“You saw me?”

“Yeah.”

“You were there?”

I start to hyperventilate again, my body wracked by a series of lung-scraping gasps. The sudden lack of air makes me dizzy. Or maybe that’s just from shock. Either way, I have to steady myself against the pool’s edge to keep from tilting over.

When I speak, it’s in sharp, ragged bursts. “Why—didn’t you—help?”

“You didn’t need help.”

“He had a knife,” I say, a warm slick of anger rising in my throat. It feels like a swallow of Wild Turkey moving in reverse, inching its way higher. “You just sat back and fucking watched.”

“I wanted to see what you would do.”

“And I almost killed a man. Happy? Was that the reaction you were looking for? Why didn’t you try to stop me?”