Chapter 1
**Three Years Ago**
The security guard at the cold storage warehouse on Rosedale Highway had a rule, and the rule was that he called the police at eleven.
Callie had worked this out on her third night in the lot. He let her drive until eleven, then walked out with his flashlight, stood at the edge of the asphalt where she could see him, and took out his phone. He never actually dialed. He held it up so she could see it in his hand, and she packed up and left, and the next night they did the whole thing again.
Tonight he came out at a quarter to ten.
“I’m calling early,” he said, through her open window. “My wife says I come home smelling like burned tires. She thinks I’m doing it.”
“Tell her it’s me.”
He looked at her for a moment, at the grey Nissan with no interior and no paint, at the girl in the driver’s seat with her hair tied back and black streaks on her forearms.
“If I tell her there’s a girl out here every night,” he said, “she’ll think I’m the one chasing you.”
Callie laughed, and started the engine, and went home early.
She had been coming to the lot alone for six weeks.
At the beginning she had asked Matt to come with her. She had thought he would want to. He raced. He knew what it was to love something with an engine in it, and she had stood on his pit wall for two seasons with a headset and a stopwatch, timing his laps, learning what every number meant. She had believed, without ever really examining it, that when her turn came he would stand next to her the way she had stood next to him.
He came once. He sat on the hood of his truck and watched her spin out three times in a row, and the third time he called out, “You’re getting there, babe,” in a warm, encouraging voice, the voice people used for small children on bicycles. Twenty minutes later he said he had an early start, and he left.
After that, he was always busy.
So she went alone. She practiced alone, and spun alone, and fixed what she broke alone, with tools she borrowed from her father’s shop and returned before he noticed. She told herself it was fine. She was twenty, and she told herself a lot of things were fine.
Matt’s house was dark at the front when she pulled up, so she went in through the side door of the garage, quietly, because he hated being woken up.
His race car sat in the middle of the garage under a cover. She walked past it in the dark, and she was almost at the door to the kitchen when she heard voices from the back porch and stopped.
One of them was Matt. The other one she didn’t know. A man’s voice, slow and easy, with the comfortable sound of somebody who had known Matt for a very long time. It took her only a minute of listening to work out who he must be. A friend from before her, from school, somebody who had moved away years ago and was back for a night. Matt had never mentioned him.
She was about to open the door and say hello. Then the friend said something and Matt laughed, really laughed, the way he almost never did anymore, and she found that she didn’t want to interrupt it.
“You remember Coach Dillard’s truck?” the friend said.
“Don’t.”
“The whole thing. Full of packing peanuts. Right up to the roof.”
“It took him two hours to find his keys,” Matt said, and they both lost it again, and Callie stood in the dark garage smiling, because it was nice to hear him like this. She thought she might wait until they were done and then go out, and he would introduce her, and his friend would like her.
“You want another beer?” Matt asked.
“Sure.” A chair creaked. The screen door opened and closed, and then opened again. “Man, what happened in here? I’ve never seen this place so clean. It didn’t look like this when you lived at your mom’s.”
“That’s Callie.”
“Who’s Callie?”
“The girl I’ve been with. Two years.”
There was a pause.
“Two years,” the friend said. “You. You never kept anybody longer than a month. What’s so special about this one?”
Matt didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice was lower.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “But you have to promise you’ll never tell anybody. Ever.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I said okay.”
Callie knew she should go. She knew it clearly, the way she knew when a car was about to let go underneath her. Whatever he was about to say had not been meant for her, and the decent thing, the normal thing, was to walk back out through the garage and come in through the front door, making noise, so they would hear her.
She didn’t move.
She could not have explained it afterward. It was as if some part of her had already understood what was coming and had decided, without asking her, that she was going to hear it.
“You remember the Hendersons’ party?” Matt said. “That summer, right before you left?”
She remembered it. She remembered very little of it, which was the point. She remembered music, and cups that somebody kept filling, and a hallway that tilted. She remembered waking up in the back seat of a car in the dark, with her shirt on wrong and a cold feeling everywhere that she did not have a word for yet. She remembered Matt in the front seat, gentle, telling her there had been two guys, that he had seen them taking her out of the house and had followed, that he had gotten her away from them, that she was safe now.
She remembered thinking he was the kindest person she had ever met.
“There was a girl there,” Matt said. “Drunk out of her mind. I watched her for like an hour. Waited till she could barely stand, and walked her out to my car, and nobody even looked.” He said it the way he talked about races, easily, a man describing something that had gone well. “When she woke up she was so scared. So I told her there’d been two guys, and I’d saved her from them. She doesn’t remember a thing. She thinks I’m a hero.”
The friend didn’t say anything.
“That’s Callie,” Matt said. “And honestly, she was that good. So I figured I’d keep her around for a while.”
“Matt.” The friend’s voice had changed completely. “That’s not funny.”
“Who’s laughing?”
Callie did not remember leaving the garage.
She remembered being in her car, parked in the dark in front of her father’s house, with the engine off and her hands on the wheel. The kitchen light was still on. Her father was in there, probably asleep in his chair with the television on, the way he always was when she came home late. She sat and looked at that light until it got grey outside, and she didn’t go in.
She broke up with Matt two days later, at a diner on Union Avenue, over a cup of coffee she didn’t drink.
She told him it was because he had never once taken her driving seriously. Because he had come to the lot once and called her babe and left. Because she had spent two years on his pit wall, and he could not spend twenty minutes on hers.
All of it was true. None of it was the reason.
Matt listened with the patient face of a man waiting for something to be over. When she was done, he shrugged.
“Sure,” he said. “If that’s what you need.”
He thought she would come back. She could see it on him as plainly as she could see the coffee in front of her. He thought she was a girl having a feeling, and that feelings passed.
He reached for his wallet. He always paid.
Callie took out three dollars, put them on the table next to her own cup, and stood up. He looked at the money, and then at her, and for the first time since she had known him, he did not seem to know what to say.
She did not tell him what she knew. She walked out to her car, and somewhere between the table and the parking lot she made herself a promise. She did not know yet what it would look like. She only knew that one day Matt Decker was going to lose something he cared about, and he was going to look up, and she was going to be the one standing there.
She did not tell anyone.
She did not completely understand why. She went over it a hundred times, at night, in the lot, under cars. Her father would have wanted to know. Then she imagined telling him, imagined his face while she said the words, and she could not finish imagining it. It would kill him. She meant that literally.
And there was something else, something she could not say even to herself without her face going hot.
She had been drunk. She had gone to that party. She had held out the cup every time somebody filled it. She knew what the answer was supposed to be. Every article she had ever read said the same thing, that it was not her fault, not ever, not even a little.
But knowing what the answer was supposed to be and believing it were not the same thing.
So she kept it. She put it somewhere inside herself, like a part she had no use for and could not throw away, and the following night she drove back out to Rosedale Highway.
The security guard watched her pull in at nine o’clock. He did not take out his phone.
He went back inside and came out a few minutes later with a folding lawn chair, and sat down to watch.
