Martin sat on the gritty walkway of the old steel bridge, his legs dangling over the industrial river far below. Passersby gave him a wide berth, casting nervous glances. Crazy person, their looks said. He didn’t care. Their world was already a distant rumor.

  He’d come here with a purpose, a final, decisive act. But when he’d peered over the edge at the cold, dark water, his body had rebelled, locking him in place with a coward’s paralysis. The contradiction tortured him. I can kill people by doing nothing, but I can’t kill myself. How pathetic is that? I deserve to die. So come on. Someone. Anyone. Take care of it for me.

  The thought became a chant in his head. He stood up, his movements slow and dreamlike. He took a step toward the chest-high railing, his fingers reaching for the cold metal.

  The impact was sudden, violent, and utterly mundane. Not a push from fate, but the clattering force of a bicycle careening into his side. He went down hard, his shoulder and head smacking the concrete. A hot, fresh wetness bloomed under the bandage on his temple.

  He looked up, dazed, into the furious, terrified face of Jennifer Briggs. She wasn’t asking if he was okay. She was standing over him, the bicycle discarded, her chest heaving.

  “Are you nuts?” she screamed, her voice raw. “What were you about to do? Jump?”

  Martin touched his head, his fingers coming away red. The pain was a sharp anchor. He looked at her, genuinely bewildered. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me?” she echoed, her voice cracking. “What’s wrong with you? You were about to throw your life away like it belongs to you alone!”

  “It does belong to me alone!” he roared back, pushing himself up on his elbows. The dam broke. “Only I have to go through this! Only I feel this! If my life was everyone else’s too, then why am I so alone?”

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  “You are not alone!” Jennifer shouted, tears finally spilling over. “You have never been alone! We all care about you! So much!”

  “Why?” The word was a guttural plea. “After what I’ve done? I’m a monster, Jennifer.”

  “You haven’t done anything—nothing bad enough to make any of us stop caring! Not me, not Sadie, not Caleb, not your family! No matter what you do, I won’t stop! I promise! If that’s what it takes to make you happy again, then that’s my promise! So please, don’t go down this path!”

  He stared at her, at the absolute, illogical conviction in her tear-streaked face. She didn’t know. She was defending a fiction.

  “You can only say that,” he said, his voice dropping to a dead calm, “because you don’t know what I did.” He told her then, the words spilling out like poison. The overheard plot. The deliberate delay. The party he attended, knowing the fire was coming. Oliver. Sadie. “I could have saved them. I chose not to. So tell me, Jennifer. How do you feel about me now? Am I not a monster?”

  Her hand moved faster than thought.

  The slap echoed across the bridge, sharp and stinging. Martin’s head snapped to the side. Pain bloomed on his cheek. And in that pain, a perverse relief flowered. Yes. Of course. Now she sees. Now she knew the truth of him.

  He turned his face back to her, a wide, terrible, psychotic smile stretching his lips. “How do you feel about me now, huh?!”

  He never saw her move. One second she was standing there, furious and crying; the next, her hands were on his face, and her lips were on his.

  The kiss wasn’t soft. It was fierce, desperate, an argument made flesh. It was salt from her tears and the copper taste of his own blood. It was a silent scream that drowned out all the words—the accusations, the confessions, the pleas.

  When she pulled away, Martin was utterly still, his monstrous smile gone, replaced by stunned, blank shock. His brain had short-circuited. Does she hate me? Or…

  Jennifer didn’t give him time to process. She scrambled back onto her bicycle, gripping the handlebars. “Get on,” she ordered, her voice hoarse but firm.

  He just stared.

  She jumped off again, marched over, and grabbed the front of his shirt. “GET ON THE BIKE!”

  He flinched. “I—”

  “You are going to apologize to Ava,” she said, her eyes blazing into his. “You are going to apologize to Oliver’s family. You are going to apologize to Sadie, and to everyone else. You don’t have to tell them why. But you will make sure you apologize. Do you understand?”

  He was mute, lost in the aftershock of the kiss, the whiplash from the slap.

  “DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” she yelled, shaking him once.

  “Yes,” he gasped. “Yes.”

  “Good.” She got back on the bike, steadying it. “Now. Get. On.”

  Mechanically, Martin stood. He wiped the blood from his temple with his sleeve. He looked at Jennifer, this force of nature who had just rerouted his path to oblivion with a kiss and a command. He didn’t understand her. He didn’t understand anything.

  But he climbed onto the bike rack behind her, holding onto her shoulders as she pushed off. The bridge, the drop, the dark water—they receded behind them, replaced by the determined set of Jennifer’s back and the unfamiliar, terrifying prospect of facing what he had done.