What Love Has Made Me Do

The car was where Sarah had left it. She fell into the driver's seat and pulled the door closed and sat in the small private dark of the cabin without starting the engine. Her hands found the steering wheel and gripped it hard enough that the bandage on her right hand gave way again under the pressure, and fresh blood ran out of the wound and down her wrist and onto her thigh, and she did not move to stop it.

The shaking, when it came, came up from somewhere underneath her ribs and worked outward through her shoulders and into her hands and her jaw. The sound that came out of her with it was not weeping yet. It was something underneath weeping, the kind of raw narrow noise a body makes when the adrenaline that has been holding it together finally lets go and the body remembers how to feel.

Karl had killed someone tonight, and walked away, and left her to find what was left of him in a cupboard. And she had moved the body. She had pushed it back into the dark with her own bleeding hand, and her blood had soaked into the dead man's jacket where the fibres would never give it up again, and there was a stolen flash drive in one pocket of her own coat now and a stolen phone in the other, and she had done all of it with the steady careful hands of a woman who had decided, without quite making the decision aloud to herself, which side of a line she was now standing on.

For the sake of my grandmother, Sarah thought, with no god in particular in mind, don't let it be Luke. Anyone but Luke.

She knew it was Luke. The address had been Luke's. The house had been Luke's. The man in the cupboard had been Luke's. Which meant the man in the cupboard was her cousin, and Karl had killed her cousin, and the praying she was doing now was the small last courtesy a person extended to themselves in the moments before they fully accepted what they already knew.

The hate, when it came, came in a particular order. Sarah hated the city first. Then she hated the island. Then she hated Karl, and the hatred for Karl came up out of her so fast and so cleanly that for a second she thought she might be sick from the force of it. And then, last and worst and most accurately, she hated herself. Because Karl's hands had done the killing but her hands had done the hiding, and her hands had been her own, and no one had made her use them.

Sarah put her bleeding hand against her mouth and let the sound that had been waiting underneath the weeping finally come out of her, alone in the dark of a parked car on a quiet street that did not know her name.