Chapter 1: The Flowers

There was still blood on my arm when I got home. Nobody had noticed. Why would they? I'd watched my clothes being taken away in sealed boxes. There was blood enough.

Thoughts came out wrong, if they came at all. Time was wrecked, and places too. Nothing followed, nothing flowed. The hospital was only ten minutes from the school gates, but it had taken me—what?—hours. It was dark when I arrived anyway, and I was so shook I couldn't remember if they'd given me the sedative before or after the cop had visited the ambulance. “What's your name, hon?” he'd asked, his features arranged just so. He had to make that face, tell me he was sorry for my loss, repeat my name back to me. This was his script.

“What's your date of birth, Erin? What's your address, Erin? Do you want us to inform anybody that you're okay, Erin?”

Oh, I'm okay, am I? Then why is this paramedic wiping blood off me?

He didn't ask which of the children had died. Maybe he didn't want me thinking about it. I wish.

After that, I was driven out towards Columbus in a hail of sirens, and then the world blinked and I was suddenly in a curtained room that reeked of lemon-scrubbed fear trying to pass as hygiene, with somebody hooking a fresh drip into my arm.

Don't even ask who told me they needed my clothes as evidence. All I know is: an orderly delivered a heap of shapeless garments donated to the hospital chaplaincy. Some dead man's sweatpants with a cigarette hole burned in the thigh. I stuck my pinky through it and thought about a hole the same size in Della Morrison. She'd been so close that her blood had set on my shirt, sticky as old syrup.

I stripped. Changed. A tech with an ID badge came in and started boxing up my clothes.

“I thought you used plastic bags?”

She didn't look up. “For clothes, we use cardboard. Plastic sweats, and then you get condensation. It can ruin the blood pattern. You get mold too.”

When she was done, she gazed at me, flat, like she couldn't figure out why I wasn't crying. You and me both, sister. It seemed like a moment when I should. Maybe the drip explained it.

Later—who knows how much later—I was discharged into an Uber paid for by the state. The hospital staff had been too busy, I hadn't seen a mirror, and my kindly, solicitous driver got the measure of me straight away and gave me silence. So nobody told me I still had blood on me. It wasn't until I got home, picked up the rain-soaked flowers left by some well-wisher, and lifted my key to the door. That's when I saw it. My arm. The dried spatter.

In movies, traumatized people knock back bourbon or slump fully dressed in the shower. Me, I dropped the wet flowers on the floor in the hallway and simply stared, already trying to build a levee around myself. Anything to hold back the flood. What I felt was too deep, too dangerous to be allowed loose. I focused instead on that checkout-register tone right at the edge of hearing, incessant in my ears. Nobody tells you how loud a handgun is in an enclosed space. Movies get that wrong too.

I felt like somebody had shuffled my brain. Let me stop, slow down, place events in order again.

First came the shooting.

Then the running and the ambulance.

Whatever had come before all of that had gotten washed away in a torrent of panic. Other than my name and the noise, all I could tell the cops that night was what came after, and they already knew that much. They'd been there, or just about.

I'd made it out of the school grounds into the arms of a uniformed kid, younger than me anyway, first on the scene and sprinting madly ahead of his older partner. He caught me, and we raced bent double along Mill Hollow, towards a rapidly gathering forest of flashing blue lights. I got bundled into an ambulance the second it arrived, and we played my first game of Repeat Erin's Name. Maybe it's just how officials are trained.

“I need to examine you for injuries, Erin. Does anywhere hurt, Erin? You're doing fine, Erin.”

Hearing my name spoken over and over again, it felt like a chant, a mantra, like I'd accidentally started a cult. The pasted-on, feel-nothing smiles from the ambulance crew didn't help. You're one of the lucky ones—that's what it was selling. All this blood isn't yours.

I didn't want to think whose it was. Plenty was Della Morrison's, I knew that much. Other kids were alive—I'd seen them run—but 400 children go to Cedar Ridge Elementary, and I knew the fates of perhaps ten. Then instinct had dragged me away from danger.

But what about that other instinct, the one that tells you you're supposed to stay with children? The one I should have had all along.

“How we doing?”

That cop, the older one, was stood on the sidewalk at the back of the ambulance, his hat in his hand. I'd seen him on Mill Hollow too. Did he help to save me? Could've. Didn't remember. Didn't know how to reply either: that I'm unharmed, apparently, so why can't I make my brain work right?

The cop heaved himself into the back and bent low to look into my eyes.

“You did nothing wrong, you hear me.”

Yeah? A half hour ago I abandoned dying kids, so fuck you, badge. He put a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Detectives and the BCI are gonna want to talk to you, but not today. Here's my card. You call me if you need anything.”

It all began—what—ten hours ago? Twelve? And now I was home, where time was meant to be one thing after another, like normal. But here I was, frozen in the hallway, a statue in grief-sweats from the tragedy bin, my own clothes tagged and boxed as evidence. How could anything be normal again?

My heart was still tuned to go off at every sound, so the rap on the door left me scrambling to breathe before I could get it together enough to peer through the spyhole. Eddie, in his shirtsleeves in the middle of the night. Had he been sitting in his car, waiting?

“Shit.”

He must've heard that. “Hey,” he called, keeping his voice low. “You okay?”

I had to let him in. What was I gonna do—fake sleep? I opened the door.

“Hey,” he said again. “I saw it on the news.”

In that small space, his bulk crowded me. I backed against the wall, shaking again, even though he was making a face to show he cared. He must have looked up how to do it before he drove over. Or copied it from a dog.

“You been smoking.”

“Jesus, is that your big problem?”

“No, no—I just… Look, I was worried, alright?”

I shook my head. Who isn't?

He stood there like he was waiting for a fresh script to appear. “They had you on Channel 9, from some guy's phone.”

Great. Way to be famous.

He took a step back and assessed the problem, as he saw it. I heard my mom's voice: The Lord sees effort, as he started again. “I can't even… I mean, fuck, Helen, I can't imagine what it was like. I just wanted to see you. Make sure you're okay.”

“What the hell are you doing here, Eddie?”

“Like I said, I saw you on the news. You were all bloody, and I—I just needed to see you. Make sure you're okay.” He shrugged. “You matter to me.”

“I matter to you,” I repeated back at him. Jesus. I closed my eyes, so I didn't have to watch him test-driving emotions.

“I get it,” he said. “I get we're not a thing or whatever. I'm not an idiot.”

“You're idiot enough to believe whoever told you you're not an idiot.”

In the silence that followed, that small line appeared between his brows.

“So… you're not Helen Calley. You're Erin Callahan. That's what they said on the news.”

I spread my arms to show the blood. “Are you kidding me right now? That's what you wanna talk about?”

“I'm here for you at three in the morning, and you didn't even tell me your right name!”

I opened the door, then slammed it behind him. He shouted that I was a bitch from the walkway. I shouted that he was a dick to the empty hallway, then I picked up the flowers and shook my head at them: can you believe this guy?

❧

In the yellow dresser I found an ancient vape, and thanked whichever God had been off duty today that it had some charge left. Barely any flavor, like sucking on an old candy wrapper, but at least it was less of a personal failure than finding a bottle. Yay me. I drew on it a few times, then shoved it into my pocket. My fingers grazed something small.

I pulled out the card the cop had given me. Officer Mark Kessler, it said, and on the back, in a tight, crabbed hand, a case number and: Call if you need me, followed by his direct line. What was it he'd said? That I'd have a visit from detectives and…? someone else, some other capital-letter agency. It wasn't the FBI, it was…

I didn't want to look it up, didn't want to know. But my hands knew my mind was screwed, and they'd taken over, handling things before my brain could interrupt.

They reached for my phone and I saw Eddie had WhatsApped me maybe a hundred times. There were messages from Ty and a half-dozen other names, even one from Danny Krawczyk, probably parked at some roadside diner a thousand miles from here. Sixteen missed calls from Mom. Was that a new record? I wasn't calling back—not now. She had a way of clawing at memories until they bled, and I was already remembering too much.

A small fist wrapped around my skirt.

“Miss Callahan?” Della's voice, clear as a bell in my head.

Then the other memory, the one I kept trying to push away. The red hoodie in the doorway. He'd pushed up his sleeves to the elbow, like he was getting down to work. My thumb, desperately mashing 9-1-1 on the screen. The door opening before I could hit send.

I'd flung the phone at him. It hit him hard, on the bare skin of his forearm. Fucker didn't even look at me. Just raised his gun.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to banish the picture.

Think of something else. Think about the problem at hand.

So I Googled: who questions you after a school shooting?

The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. BCI. That's what Kessler had said.

This was better. Tasks.

Tasks are easier than feelings.

I spent an hour digging. Do I get my clothes back? How long does the investigation take? And—this one mattered, because my head was still leaking from the seams—What happens if I don't answer questions?

I dropped my phone when it vibrated in my hand. Another message from Mom. “Pick up. We're all praying for you.”

Nothing from Dad, of course.

I needed another chore, anything to keep my hands busy, anything to keep my mind off my mind. My eyes drifted around the room—the garbage, the folded pile of laundry—and then they landed on the flowers I'd dumped on the kitchen counter after Eddie left.

Gerbera daisies and baby's breath in fancy-ass wrapping, their stems probably crushed now, dripping rainwater. Just another mess I'd have to clean up. I didn't even know if I owned a vase. I'd just stick them in the sink for now. The ribbons were already limp, the cellophane smeared with dirt, and tucked deep inside the wrapping was a small, plain white card. I almost missed it. Probably just a generic note from a well-wisher. Thinking of you. Perfect. Fucking. Timing.

I held the bouquet over the sink and pulled the card free. Crisp and stiff, as impersonal as a receipt—small, square, plain.

No name. Just five printed words.

The air punched from my lungs and my stomach bottomed out.

“I killed them for you.”