To go or not to go, that is the question. I could just as easily skip town. Take the money and run. Keep it simple. I’m on the fence about it, to be sure. What would it take to drive in the other direction and not look back? What does it take for a person to betray those they’re supposed to love most? Do I have it in me?

People like to think it’s the spilt-second decisions that make the difference, do or don’t, walk away or stay, and sometimes it is. More often than not, it isn’t. Usually, there’s momentum behind that decision, a whole set of forces, seen or unseen, leading up to the act. It’s important to understand those forces. It’s important to understand what momentum can do. You let things build, brush aside your feelings, delay the conversation, ignore the slight gnaw in your gut. Until one day, it happens. You’re sucker-punched. Jab. Uppercut. Right hook.

How could I have missed the signs, you’ll ask yourself.

You didn’t miss them. You just weren’t looking hard enough.

June insisted we take the family to Cabo San Lucas one summer. It was against my better judgment to travel to a country where the odds of kidnapping are quite high. But June insisted, so I took a class on counterterrorism and negotiation tactics. Just in case. I’d hoped not to have to put them to good use, but as they say, every dog has his day.

First, I can tell you this. In any negotiation, there’s always leverage. Negotiation is never a linear formula: add A to B to get C. Everyone has blind spots. Mark is no different. He’s irrational, yes, but like anyone, he has hidden needs, a universe of variables that can be leveraged to change his ideas and expectations.

Now that he has something of mine in his possession, the goal is to shape his reality so it conforms to what I ultimately want to give him, not what he initially thinks he deserves.

And if this doesn’t work, I can always throw a bit of jujitsu in the mix.

“I told you,” Mark warned. “I gave you time. I was patient. You should have moved on your first target by this point.”

“How?”

“I don’t know—you’re a smart man. Figure it out.”

“But how could I do that? I’ve been dealing with the quarterly reports… I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work.” Already, I feel my training kicking in. It’s like a bicycle. Once you learn, you can’t forget.

As I expected, his tone grew more agitated during our second phone call. “I told you to handle it or I’d handle her.”

I want to ask why he’s doing this. Why now, when I was so close to getting away from here. But that’s not the question to ask. “How am I supposed to do that?” I demand with a loud exhale. Never ask questions that start with “why.” “Why” is always an accusation, in any language.

“Like I said. You’re a smart guy. I trust that you’ll figure it out.” Mark excels at speaking vaguely. Best not to incriminate himself. But the manipulation, the incessant persuasion, the indirect bullying it’s all there just underneath the surface waiting to be unearthed, begging to be misunderstood.

“You had choices,” he cautions. Nails on a chalkboard to my ears. When people issue threats, directly or indirectly, they create ambiguities they fully intend to exploit. In this case, it’s me. A loss, even a perceived one, is far worse than a gain. He knows this. It could be conscious. It could be subconscious. But he knows. This is why he has my wife.

“I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”

“Do you want to make this right, Tom? That’s what I need to know.”

“Yes, but how?” Yes is nothing without how. I listen to Mark breathe into the receiver. I let the silence between us linger. The less one says in any negotiation, the better. Listening is one of the most powerful tools a person can have in their arsenal—one which few people utilize for all it’s worth.

“You tell me.”

The secret to gaining the upper hand in negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.

“How about this…how about I come to you and we come up with a plan? You know better than anyone that acting in haste is senseless.”

“Okay,” he says, as though this was what he’d wanted all along. “That sounds good. We’re at the lake house.”

“The lake house.” It’s not meant to be a question. I turn the car around and I drive in the direction of my wife’s captors. I’ve already lost enough. I won’t let them make me a coward, too.

“Oh, and Tom…”

“Yes?”

“Don’t fuck this up.”

I veer left in the direction I’ve been instructed to take. Not to my house. For this to go as planned, I knew I had to negotiate away from there. I had to come at Mark with a surprise. I call him back.

“This is good,” I say. “About the lake house.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“She can’t swim.”

“Beth is here.”

“Mark,” I remind him. “We have to do what we have to do.” He doesn’t know that I know why he wants those men killed. They’re not just men my wife slept with. They’re competition. Competition that will be as quick to put the move on his devotees as he would be on theirs. Austin isn’t big enough yet for multiple gurus. Mark wants to be the only one. I take a deep breath in. “We can’t have people thinking deception among us is okay. No one respects weakness.”

“No one,” he agrees.

“That’s why we have to be smart about this. We must send a message without outing ourselves. We have to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

“Maybe I should just kill her now.” He’s testing me. Melanie is Mark’s leverage. Without her, there’s only me. If he’d wanted to start there, he would have. Mark does not do busy work.

“Whatever you want,” I tell him. “I just want what’s best for the church. We need strong leadership. We need someone in control. You’re always saying that…”

“Excellence, yes.” He doesn’t think I’m the guy for the job. He wants to—but he’s not sure.

Now that I’d anchored his emotions in a minefield of low expectations, I play on his loss aversion. “She’s my wife. Wait and let me handle this like I said I would.”

Mark wants me to level with him. He seeks control. He wants me to compromise my own. I refuse. People don’t compromise because it’s right; they compromise because it is easy. It’s safe. I refuse to show some pretend moral good that in essence only exists as weakness. Unlike me, most people in a negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Too few are driven by their actual goals.

I can hear Mark breathing. I can hear the wheels turning. “Yeah, you’re right. Sometimes it’s good to make an example out of a person.” He cackles like the unstable person he is. “Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I say. “I do.”

“At least this way my wife won’t get any ideas.” He exhales. “Beth never cared for her anyway.”

“Beth was right about her all along,” I offer as a concession. It’s not a lie. That’s why it works.

Mark hangs up. I step on the gas. Sure, I could leave her. I could let her answer for her mistakes. The only problem with that is eventually, everyone has to. And as the saying goes, the best way to ride a horse is in the direction in which it is going.

It’s pitch black out when I arrive, save for the lights that line the drive. I doubt Mark knows about the missing funds yet. Chances are, with my wife around, he has his hands full. That’s my play, if things get too bad. I have something he wants—his money—he has something I want—my wife.

“Speak of the devil,” he says, opening the door to greet me. I don’t even have to knock. I take in what I’ve walked into: the shiny metal glint of a gun tucked in his waistband.

I follow him into the great room. I’ve always liked the windows in this place. It helps that at night they look like mirrors. In the reflection, I can see my wife is seated in an armchair, one wrist cuffed to it.

“You realize she could just drag the chair,” I say to Mark. Clearly, he doesn’t know Melanie when she’s determined about something.

He shrugs. “It’s a heavy son of a bitch.”

Beth is seated on the couch opposite my wife. She doesn’t acknowledge me. She’s staring at her phone.

“Glad you could finally join us,” Melanie says to me, one eyebrow cocked. She doesn’t like how much I’ve been working recently. “If you’d come home sooner, you could have saved us both a trip out here. Although I’m sure yours was more comfortable.”

I glance at Mark. I should have assumed. “You put her in the trunk?”

“She was naked,” Beth answers.

This makes sense. I do not recognize her clothes.

Mark pulls me aside. “You say Melanie can’t swim…”

“That’s right.” When Mark wants to make a point, he enjoys taking the scenic route.

“In that case, I thought the lake would be an appropriate place to do the job. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Four friends go out on a boat. They take a moonlight swim. Only three come home…”

“There’s no moon,” I say.

“Details, my friend.”

I glance over my shoulder at my wife. “Devil’s always in the detail.”

She’s dressed in jeans that are too big for her, a navy striped boatneck tee and Sperrys. She has a red bandana tied around waterfall curls. “You look like Boating Barbie,” I say to her when we walk back into the great room. I hope she takes the hint.

She presses her lips together. “Always one to play the part.”

“I let her play around in my closet,” Beth mentions. “While we were waiting on you.” This doesn’t make any sense. If she wants Melanie dead, why would she let her play dress up? Beth glances at the time. “I don’t understand why you have a fast car if you insist on driving the speed limit.”

I guess this means we’re even. But I don’t owe Beth the dignity of an answer, so I don’t give one. After several moments, Mark clears his throat. Subtlety has never been his strong suit. “Speaking of speed—you haven’t seen the new boat, have you?”

I read his expression. He winks. He hasn’t told his wife what we’ve planned. She doesn’t know my wife has been brought here to die.

“No,” I say. “I haven’t.”

“You have to see it.”

Beth frowns. But she does not look up from her phone. “It’s too late to take the boat out, darling.”

“Nah.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“You drive.”

She uses her toes to point at the wine glass on the coffee table. “I’ve had a few glasses myself.”

“Tom can drive.”

Beth lets out a heavy sigh. “You’re relentless.”

“I hate boats. I can’t swim,” Melanie says.

I know what she is thinking. We’ve had this talk before. Once when we were first together. When our relationship consisted of hotel rooms and time constraints. Her teaching me, me teaching her. Never let them take you to a second location. I give her a look that asks her to trust me. I can see she doesn’t.

“That’s okay,” Mark tells her. “We won’t be doing much of that.”

Mark goes over the boat in great detail, which under normal circumstances I would appreciate. Here and now, it feels like overkill. After he’s taken nearly an hour of my time explaining boating terminology at length, all the while he and the rest of the crowd consume another bottle of wine, I am finally allowed to stretch my sea legs. “Stay in the middle,” he instructs, and you’d think I’d never been on a boat before. “We’ll take her over to the cove.”

Beth and Melanie sit up front. I’m in the driver’s seat. Mark is to my left.

I start out slow at first. Get my bearings. Then I push faster. Use barriers. Make them guess wrong. I want my happy ending. It is a speedboat, after all. I push it to the limit. Mark smiles. He likes his toys. Melanie’s hair whips in the wind. It’s a lovely night, save for what I’m about to do. She glances back at me. I mouth the word jump. She shakes her head slightly. Mark looks at me. We’re going so fast he has to yell. He gives me the thumbs up. “She’s really something isn’t she?”

“She is,” I say. I know he’s talking about his plaything. I’m talking about mine.

“Jump,” I mouth to Melanie. I slow a bit, and then I push the lever all the way down. She doesn’t listen as usual.

I correct my steering, wavering just a little. Beth glances back. Mark holds his palm up. He wants me to slow down.

I overcorrect hard to the left. My gut sets.

“Sorry,” I yell in Mark’s direction. There’s an icy burn in my throat. I didn’t have to speak to know it was there.

I realize this is it. It’s now or never. I want him to realize what is about to happen. I want him to get a feel for having a dead wife. It’s still revenge, no matter how short-lived.

His face is contorted as his mind works to slowly piece together his future.

My eyes dart toward Melanie as though to say, what choice did I have?

This is for June, I tell myself as I line up the proper angle. And then, all of a sudden, everything is happening in slow motion. Life is on pause, in rewind, before it is in fast forward. Somehow this does not seem like enough for all he’s put me through over the years. I want to dig a hole and put him in it. Alive. I want to set fire to his feet and watch it rise until it engulfs the rest of him. I want to starve a pack of dogs and feed him to them limb by limb. There are a million ways I’d like to kill Mark Jones, and I die a little inside knowing that I have to settle on one that will be quick.

I take a hard left straight into the side of the cliff.

I bail, hitting the water hard. Given my speed, I knew I would. I call for Melanie, hoping she managed to make it off in time. Whoever was still on that boat when it hit is no more.

The boat itself is mostly no more. What’s left is a blur of fiberglass and aluminum twisted around itself. It’s sure to catch fire.

I swim hard. I call for her, searching the water out in front of me. There’s nothing but darkness.

After what feels like an eternity, I feel a tug on my arm. My heart leaps into my throat. “Tom!”

“Melanie?”

“Oh my God,” she cries. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I don’t want to die.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“We have to swim.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re doing fine,” I say, slipping one arm under hers. “Hang on to me.”

I swim. I kick with everything I’ve got.

“You have to help,” I tell her. I’m panting hard. I can’t suck in enough air. I smell gasoline. “It could still blow.”

“The trick,” I tell her, “Is not to panic.”

The smoke from the boat rolls over us.

Suddenly, we’re moving faster, and eventually, we find, or rather we hit, a jagged edge. I hoist Melanie up.

“I have to catch my breath,” I say. “I think my ribs are broken.”

“How are we going to get out of here?” She does exactly what I’ve advised her not to do. She panics.

“We’re going to have to swim up the lake for a bit until we find flat land…”

“You know I can’t swim, Tom. I can’t.”

“I’ll help you,” I assure her. “We’ll do it together.”

“It’s pitch black out here.”

“It’s better this way.”

I hear Melanie pull herself further onto the ledge. “They’re dead. We killed them.”

“They had a boating accident,” I correct her. “We weren’t here.”

Eventually, she says, “That’s really brilliant, Tom. Really brilliant.”

“What are you doing?” I can’t see anything. “Is there room up there for me?” I don’t know if I have the strength to pull myself up.

“Thank you for coming for me.” Her voice is far away.

“My pleasure.” My ribs ache. “Come down. You have to get back in the water.”

“I can’t.”

“We have to swim now. We can’t stay here. Someone’s bound to have heard the crash.”

She doesn’t respond.

“Melanie?”

“I can’t, Tom.”

“I’ll help you.” It hurts to talk. It hurts to move. “Just let me catch my breath.”