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In case we don’t make it.

Jane nods. “I understand,” she says, pulling her hand back and resting it in her lap. There’s a bandage across the flesh of her palm now, covering the small cut she made with the others to offer up blood for the Mimic’s bait.

She didn’t blink as she dragged Kimi’s pocketknife across the faint, pale line scarred there from when she cut it on glass in the fraternity house basement. At the hospital after the accident, no one had thought anything of the small gash; it was simply another wound in need of stitches.

Now, the blood is hers to give, hers to lose.

Ashley sucks in another breath, swiping a hand across her cheek. “Right, then,” she says, forcing a shaky, miserable laugh. “Anything you want to get off your chest?”

Jane closes her fingers into a fist, wishing suddenly to flee this small bloody room and never return. This time when she looks, the sight of the broken handcuffs on the floor doesn’t freeze her limbs in place or stir up nausea in her stomach.

There is only a familiar burning, one she’s felt forced to smother for the sake of everyone else’s hearts, at the expense of her own. It creeps up in her blood now, licking up the length of her bones until her mind lights up and drags her under.

—

Of all the terrible things that happened that night in September, the moment Jane wanders back to the most is not of the dark tunnel in the fraternity house basement or being trapped down in Thomas’s car. It is from the days following the accident, when her brain was just beginning to escape the fog of painkillers and shock, still recovering within the confines of the hospital.

Upon arrival, she had immediately been taken back for brain scans, while Thomas was rushed off into emergency surgery to remove the tree branch lodged through his arm.

When they had both been moved into their own rooms, their parents took frequent turns shifting between them, though Jane soon noticed that her mother tended to be present at her bedside more often than her father. And on one of those blurry days in recovery when both of her parents happened to be with Thomas, she found herself spiraling toward another restless nap.

Jane’s eyes had nearly fallen shut when she glimpsed a stranger’s face staring in through the glass. A knock sounded lightly before a middle-aged woman walked in. Her chestnut hair was uncombed, sticking up on one side like she had just woken up from a fitful nap in one of the uncomfortable guest chairs in the hallway. The dark, sunken circles beneath her eyes seemed to swallow up what otherwise was a very pretty shade of light blue. The woman’s fingers fidgeted with a rosary as she lowered herself into the vinyl chair next to the bed, sitting up straight on the seat’s edge.

For a full minute, she just stared—not at the hospital gown or wires or bandage on Jane’s head, where the skin had been mangled by glass. She stared at Jane’s face. She stared as though she could see clear through her, past the flesh and bone and spirit, all the way to someone else entirely.

Finally, the woman offered a faint smile. “I’m sorry,” she began, and her voice broke in two. “You must be so uncomfortable, having a stranger just coming in here like this.”

Jane had found it uncomfortable and strange, though something about the woman had softened her, like witnessing a bird with broken wings try to navigate the cold ground.

“Are you one of the hospital’s chaplains?” Jane asked.

The woman frowned down at her rosary, thumbing at the rose-colored beads. “No. No, I’m not,” she said. “You see, I was just visiting Lucas Davis in his room down the hall, and he told me that you know—knew my son. That you were his date the night of the accident.”

The heart rate monitor suddenly picked up, beeping faster. Jane forced herself to breathe, and suddenly she could see the resemblance—the hollow spot in the woman’s left cheek where a dimple existed, the light blue eyes, and the thick, wavy hair.

“I guess I’m just trying to understand it better,” Aiden’s mother continued in a voice a little louder than a hush. “Understand why he would have driven after drinking so much. It just doesn’t make any sense to us, my husband and me.” Her eyes filled with tears then, close to flooding over the brims.

Jane felt her face tighten, and a thornlike twist speared through her gut. “I don’t know,” she whispered, though she could practically smell the apple whiskey, see their bottle lying shattered on the ground at their feet as he nudged her thighs open with his knees. “I’m—” Jane paused, biting down hard on her lip. The woman’s watery stare was like a brand, until Jane finally forced the words. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said.

Aiden’s mother nodded vacantly as fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. “I just wish I could understand it,” she repeated. “I just want to understand what he—what had he been like that night? Before?”

Jane listened as the beeping of the heart monitor quickened again, and something equivalent to a lit fuse began to spread in her chest. How could she possibly tell this woman the truth? How could she share that the scrape marks on her back and the fingerprint bruises on her forearms were not from their car crashing into a tree, but from her deceased son?

When her own mother had shared who the smeared body of the other driver on the road had been, how could Jane possibly share her bright, hideous relief?

The simplest answer was that she couldn’t say any of those things—not with a grieving mother staring back at her, looking ready to be knocked over by even the slightest gush of air. Not when Aiden had been wiped from the earth so thoroughly, though not before trying to take her down with him.

So Jane clenched her fists beneath the thin, scratchy hospital blanket and took a deep, rattling breath that pinched at her side where her ribs had broken.

“Everyone liked your son,” she said, as evenly as her voice would allow. “He made people feel special—made them feel seen.”

Any other words had fallen to dust in her mouth like ashes of a corpse.

Aiden’s mother nodded, cried some more, and thanked her. After the door had closed, Jane shoved her face into her pillow and screamed.

—

“Jane?” Ashley says now, drawing her back to their blood-drenched underworld. “Are you alright?”