“I’m Elizabeth.”

Brynn’s back is to me, and that’s probably a good thing. I don’t know which reaction is on my face right now. I know which one is in my head. It’s a little What the fuck mixed with At least I know something about you.

“Okay.” The word slides slowly from my lips. I don’t know what to say next. Besides, I think Brynn is the person who needs to keep talking.

“Do you want to know why I’m going by my middle name?”

More relief. At least the name I’ve known her by is in her real name at all. I think Brynn suits her better anyway.

“Why?”

Brynn turns over. Her eyes are frightened, wide and round, but they’re on my face. She lays her head on her pillow and continues talking. “Until I decided to come here, I was Elizabeth Brynn Montgomery. Technically, I still am. It’s not officially changed. Nobody ever really called me Elizabeth, anyway. Liz, mostly. Lizzie, to my closest friends, and then my name was in the media, and they referred to me as Elizabeth. Kind of like your mother calling you by your full name when you’re in trouble. That’s what I was in. A whole lot of trouble.” Her eyes fill with tears. “I’d been reckless for a while, but never anything too terrible. On the morning it all happened, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I wasn’t speeding, I wasn’t texting, I hadn’t been drinking.”

The puzzle pieces aren’t fitting yet, but they are shifting.

“A new mom jumped in front of my car. With her stroller.” Brynn chokes on the word stroller. She squeezes her eyes shut.

This is so much worse than what I thought it was. I don’t know what I thought, but it was never this. “Brynn, you don’t have to tell me all this. I see how upsetting it is.”

She takes a deep breath and opens her eyes. Now they are shiny but less frightened. “I do, Connor. Keeping the truth from everybody is a terrible burden. If I can tell at least one person, it makes me feel just a little bit lighter.”

I take her hand and wrap it in my own. “I’m listening.”

“They died instantly. It was a major road, and she just…” Her voice trails off, her head shaking rapidly. “I still feel it sometimes. The awful bumps. You’ve never heard or felt a sound like this, Connor. Never. There’s no way to describe it, but it will never leave me. I can’t un-feel it or un-hear it.”

Tears trickle out of her eyes and run sideways into the pillow, but she doesn’t stop talking.

“The media didn’t care that I was innocent. They didn’t care what the police told them. They cared only that their headlines got clicks. I was turned from a club-promoter to a raging, selfish party girl overnight. They dragged up every person I ever came into contact with, even people I don’t remember having a conversation with. A couple years before I’d been pulled over, and cited for drinking and driving. They used that in their smear campaign, of course.”

Her eyes are haunted, the ghosts of what she’s been through floating through her mind. It wrecks me to see her in so much pain.

“Nobody needed to read the story and see the date. All they needed to make a judgment was the headline. Driver who struck and killed mother and baby cited for DUI sounded a hell of a lot like the DUI went hand-in-hand with the accident. I was a victim of what that woman did, but in the court of public opinion, I was the executioner. I was fired from my job. Nobody wanted my name associated with their business, my so-called friends were history, and I pushed away any real friends I had.”

“So you came here to get away from it?”

“Sort of. I’d recently begun to get letters from the husband of the woman who jumped in front of me. They were,” she pauses, her lips twisting, “not nice, I guess you could say.”

“How not nice?”

Getting up from the bed, she walks to the dresser and opens the top drawer, coming back with a stack of envelopes.

“Here,” she says, climbing back into bed and setting them between us. Instead of lying back down she sits cross-legged. I sit up, doing the same, and reach for the first envelope.

By the time I’m through them all, I can barely see straight. Fury clouds my vision. This man is delusional. Brynn isn’t safe. No wonder she was so mean when she met me. Anybody in her position would protect themselves the way she did.

“Brynn, do the police know about this?” I hold up the last letter, the worst of them all.

She shakes her head.

“They need to.”

She shrugs, defeated. “I can’t. I just can’t bring myself to report him. I already took his family, whether I’m innocent or not. It happened. My car. Am I supposed to hurt him further?”

“If he’s going to hurt you, then yes, you need to nail that fucker to the wall.”

“He’s not going to hurt me,” she says, but it’s without conviction. She wants to believe he won’t, but deep down she’s not certain.

“He doesn’t know where I went. And”—her eyes are timid, but she forges ahead—“Brighton is only a stop along the way. I needed a safe place, a job, and anonymity.”

Her revelation hits me like a bullet, piercing my flesh and ripping through my insides. “You’re not staying in Brighton.” The words leave me hollow.

She shakes her head. “The plan has always been to make as much as I can until my parents can help me. They have their fishing business, and the high season starts now.”

“And then?”

“My end destination is Brazil. On a beach, renting out lounge chairs to vacationers.” She takes the last letter from my hand and stacks it with the other ones. “Somewhere I can fade into the background, and watch everyone around me live.”

I hear what she’s not saying, and I wonder if she hears it too. She’s not just running from the crazy husband and father who wants to hurt her. This is some sort of penance. I have no idea what it feels like to be involved in the death of someone else, especially an innocent baby. Or to have my name smeared in the media. It sounds like she should be suing them for slander.

“You weren’t part of my plan, Connor.” She runs her fingers down the length of my arm. Her lips twist.

I nod, trying desperately to recover from the proverbial kick in the nuts she just delivered to me. “You’re still planning to leave?”

She nods, but it’s so small, so imperceptible, it makes me think she doesn’t want to go through with it. “Every day takes me a little farther from what happened. One step closer to a semblance of normalcy. I want a life where I don’t need to use door alarms anymore. Where I don’t have to fear recognition. For that, I need distance.”

I wish she weren’t right. I wish I didn’t understand. I wish I had it in me to guilt trip, manipulate, and coerce her into staying.

I slip a curled finger under her chin and tip it up. “Promise me something?”

“I can try.”

“Don’t leave without telling me.”

Her eyebrows pinch. “Wouldn’t it be easier if one day I was gone? If neither of us had to go through the heartache of a goodbye?”

“I don’t think so.”

She sighs and looks at me. The pain in her eyes hurts me too.

She doesn’t mention the promise again. Neither do I. We’re different. I want to put myself through the experience. She wants to avoid it altogether.

I stay with her that night. It’s not only that I want to protect her. Now there’s an invisible clock, ticking away every second we have together. I want to bury my head in the sand and forget about it, want to bury myself in her and pretend her problems don’t exist. I settle for curling my body behind hers and slipping into her in a luxurious and unhurried pace.

At the crack of dawn, I leave to go home and change. I take a shower, dress, and go to my parents’ house.

Typical Monday. Yet my life is now anything but typical.