Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sasha
The rain turns from drizzle to a hard, pounding rain as she hears the sirens howl down the lane. She tries to run toward them,
but she can’t tell which way that is in the darkness and the thick of trees. She feels Tom behind her. She hears his footfalls
on the wet ground and hears his breathing, so she cuts a sharp turn and thinks she’s heading west of the house now, but in
the darkness she’s only guessing.
She hopes that his pursuit of her means Regan and Raff will be able to escape, and if what Regan said is true and Andi is there and if she’s hurt, at least help is on the way now.
All Sasha can do now is get as far away as she can.
Tom has a new life planned for them all—he made an escape and a new identity sound easy.
He made it sound like she has a choice, but she knows now what he’s capable of and there’s no choice.
She has to reach the road. She can hear the sirens, maybe only a mile away now.
Maybe already on the dirt road leading to the house.
She’s so close to escaping him and then . . .
There is a hand over her mouth and his arm around her neck. She coughs, gasps for breath and tries to cry out, but she can’t;
he’s caught her. She can’t even beg him to let her go or reason with him because his grip is so tight and he’s dragging her
with all his strength, back the way she just ran from. She realizes she’s practically gone in a circle and the dirt driveway
is only yards away.
“Shhh, it’s okay, baby,” he soothes, forcing her into the shotgun seat of the pickup truck in the driveway and getting behind
the wheel. He pulls out with a screech of the tires, headed down the wrong way—he’s driving into the wooded area on a path
made for snowmobiles and hikers, not cars, but it’s the only way he can escape the police. There is only one road leading
to Raffy’s house. Behind it is all woods and cliffside, so not to risk getting caught, he flies through the forest, branches
scraping the glass, the truck bumbling and jolting. Sasha screams for him to stop, begs him, but he only drives faster, more
recklessly.
“Slow down. Please, Tom. Stop!”
“You have to trust me, Sasha. I have a plan for us.”
“I’ll do whatever you want. Just . . . please. You’re gonna get us killed. Tom. The police are coming. Everyone in that house
just witnessed everything. You can’t run,” she says, trying to make sense of it all and rationalize it in her own mind, but
knowing deep down that if any of the stuff Drew showed her is true, Tom is so deeply cunning and evil. He probably has every
step of this planned, an option for any outcome.
“Don’t worry about the witnesses. It’s all falling into place,” he says as the truck hits a low-hanging branch and the window cracks.
Sasha screams. She feels like her heart can’t take any more.
There’s blood seeping from Tom’s hand and covering the steering wheel and clutch.
She feels like she’ll throw up. She shakily feels for her seat belt and buckles it, certain he’s going to crash into a tree at any moment.
“What’s falling into place? What do you mean? The police are on their way to that house.”
“Yeah. Good. Your deadbeat ex-husband is taken care of. I cut him loose.”
“What does that mean?” she yells over the driving rain and humming motor as she hangs on for dear life.
“His gun killed Andi. I wore gloves. The only fingerprints they’ll find are his. I’m sure there are years of his fingerprints
on it. Not mine,” he says. “Tia’s headband was found by the kids in his firepit. I used his truck when I shot Jack. They didn’t
see my face. Raffy is guilty. I took care of him for you. Even if we’d stayed at the house, I’m sure the police would find
all of this verifiable and arrest him. But of course we had to run for our lives. He’s a maniac. We were in danger. I told
you I’m taking care of this family. I’m only thinking of you. Now we’re free. Can you not see that? Jack was my last job.
We’re out. Babe, can’t you see that this is amazing? It’s all behind us. And Regan? That’s just a happy accident—having the
most unreliable and unhinged bitch in town shoot me when it’s her husband who committed the federal crime by faking a death?
Didn’t expect that, but I’ll take it.”
As he talks and the weight of it all sits heavy on her chest, as each piece of the puzzle finally comes together, she sees the panic on his face before she sees what’s coming.
The world goes completely silent as she watches his eyes bulge and his foot desperately slam the brakes.
The car tires start to skid over the wet ground, but it’s too late.
Tom can’t stop what he’s started. The cliffside is close. He can’t stop in time.
The truck crashes into the metal safety rail at the edge of the lookout, skidding violently through the steel and over the
edge of the cliff. Sasha closes her eyes, gripping the dash so hard she’s sure her fingers are bleeding, screaming as her
life unfolds before her, and that’s really what happens—she sees flickers and flashes of memory: a doll she lost when she
was six, a school dance she left crying, a first kiss, Raffy singing karaoke on a cruise ship, Drew’s drum set he doesn’t
know he’s getting for Christmas, Chloe’s drawing on the fridge—thoughts that don’t belong in this terrifying moment.
They soar through the air and her stomach flips and then she hears the crashing metal and her body is smashed and thrust into
the dash and slammed back again against the side door, and she knows this is the last moment of her life and she wails for
her kids that she didn’t protect and for Raffy. And then, when everything stops and finally goes quiet, she opens her eyes
and finds she’s not dead.
The metal rail must have softened the blow and slowed the skid of the truck enough that it didn’t go soaring into the jagged
rocks fifty feet down below. Instead, it dropped and crashed only eight feet or so onto a ledge of rock jetting out below
as part of the walking trail leading down to the riverbed at the bottom.
The truck has flipped and dangles over the edge of the rock, threatening to drop with any sudden move, teetering on the edge.
Sasha tries to take it in—where she is, and how delicate any movement is.
She’s strapped into the seat, suspended and hanging precariously by her seat belt, upside down, holding her breath, terrified that if she so much as breathes, the car will plummet to the rocks below.
It’s so quiet. She looks to the driver’s seat, and Tom isn’t there. She squints in the dim light from the dashboard, which
blinks as it shorts out.
“Oh, God,” she whispers to herself. She feels the truck shift and hears rocks beneath it crumble, then tap and knock as they
fall the distance down the side of the cliff. She doesn’t move. She barely breathes. She hears Tom. He makes a low moan, but
he’s not in the truck. She was belted in, but he must have been flung from the car on impact. He’s close, though.
She wonders if the police will find them and how long she has before the rock shifts under the weight and she plunges to her
death. Before she can think about any way she might make it out of this alive, the seat belt squeaks. She lifts her eyes up
to see that there’s a tear in the belt where the metal clasps meet—damaged from the crash. The material sounds one more warning
groan, and then it gives out and Sasha falls from the upside-down seat and crashes onto the roof of the car, which is now
underneath her.
She doesn’t dare cry or scream bloody murder the way she wants. She holds perfectly still, shocked that the jolt didn’t tip
the vehicle over the edge. She sees that in the back of the old-model cab, the center window slides over to open, no power
required. She has to try. She has no idea what her fate will be if she waits much longer, hoping and praying the truck doesn’t
fall.
She maneuvers herself into a position to push the back window open.
She grunts, using both hands. It’s stuck like it’s never been opened before, but she is filled with fury and adrenaline and so she keeps pushing until it slips open with a hard smack.
She begins to cry tears of gratitude and relief, but tries to stay calm so she can carefully push her body through the small square, shaking and praying for one more second, just one more second until she can find her feet on the rock beneath her.
Then with one more blind thrust, she’s through the open window and sobbing at the feel of the rain pounding on her back as she crawls, trembling, out of the truck and onto solid ground.
She drops to her knees and tries to calm her racing heart so she can collect herself enough to figure out what to do next.
She looks up the cliffside, sharp and steep, and there’s no way she could climb it.
Then she looks at the steep drop below, and she sees him.
Tom is there, bloody from his hand wound, but also an injury to his head. The blood runs in streaky fingers down his face
and he looks even more terrifying than before. He’s caught. His jacket is snagged on a flag of metal. There’s a safety rail
here just like the one they crashed through above, protecting hikers from the edge. Tom must have been thrown from the truck
and hit the rail, breaking it—it looks like he’s caught on a jagged piece. He’s hanging there, only the torn arm of his jacket
and the one hand he’s gripping on with keeping him up. He can’t bear weight on his wounded hand, so he’s shaking with the
effort. He calls to her.
“Help me,” he barks in a hoarse voice. She can see the outline of him only because one headlight from the car is still shining,
so she feels her way over.
“Pull me up,” he hisses, and she can see his grip slipping, his face red and bloody. She crawls over to him carefully because she has to help him. She can’t let the man die, no matter how despicable he is. She’s not that person.
“I can’t,” she cries, because she knows there’s no way she can hold his weight, but he’s helping by pushing up with one hand
and getting a foothold on the jagged rocks below him. The collar of his jacket rips, and he slips down a little farther, feeling
for her hand, begging her to help him.
She gives him her hand, and he grips it so tightly it steals her breath. She thinks about Jack and Andi, but mostly she thinks
about what this will do to her children, whom she’s gone to such great lengths to provide a normal life for—getting Drew away
from the dysfunction of Raff back when he was descending into addiction, even though it killed her. This will forever write
on the slate of who her children are. It will change them and shape the people they become when they inevitably find out who
Tom is, and then she thinks about Raff. How Tom has spent time scouting out his property, setting him up, piece by piece,
taking advantage of a vulnerable man after everything they already put him through—Tom and his family took Raffy’s life, stripped
him of his dignity and future, and then when he became a shell of a man who could no longer cope after so much trauma, after
he crumbled under the weight of it, Tom framed him for his own crimes.
But not Raffy. You don’t fuck with Raffy. Sasha will protect him to the end. And then she can’t tell if it’s the rain battering
down on them that makes her hand slip . . . or maybe she let go? . . . but in one final tear of Tom’s jacket, she loses her
grip and Tom falls. She sees him drop from her sight and then she can only hear his cry echoing off the cliff walls as he’s
swallowed by the darkness. She can’t witness him crash onto the rocks below.
She moves away from the edge, panicked, hiccupping sobs taking over her body, and she kneels on the ground, heaving.
She tries to catch her breath. She screams for help but only hears her own voice echo in the black air, so she curls up in a tiny ball and, as the rain beats down on her body, she prays to God that help will come.