Chapter 7

The yard was a sheet of ice.

I slipped once, went down on my knee, and got up without feeling it. The barn lights flickered in the wind. The milk house glowed ahead, cold and white. Dean disappeared inside. I hit the door a second later.

He was standing by the bulk tank with my phone in his hand. The screen was bright in the dark. He had opened the voice memo app. His thumb hovered over the file.

“Don’t,” I said.

“You don’t understand.”

“I heard the beginning, Dean. I heard you tell her to use the syringe.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You meant exactly what you said.”

He shook his head. His breath came in clouds. “The farm is gone if we don’t do this. The debt. The bank. We lose everything. The house. The land. Emmie’s school. Your job. Everything.”

“So you sell your mother?”

“She doesn’t know what’s happening half the time.”

“She knows enough to be afraid of you.”

He flinched. The phone trembled in his hand.

“Priss is the one who brought the syringe,” he said. “She’s the one who attacked you. I was trying to contain her.”

“You were trying to contain me.”

“Nessa-”

“You asked where my phone was. Not if I was hurt.”

He looked down at the phone. His thumb pressed the screen. I saw the delete button. I saw the file name. I saw the little cloud icon in the corner, gray and dead.

Then the lights flickered.

The Wi-Fi router in the farm office had a battery backup. I knew that because I had helped Dean install it. The storm had knocked out the main line, but the router had been struggling all night. In the milk house, the phone caught a single bar.

The cloud icon turned blue.

The upload bar appeared.

Dean stared at it. “No.”

The bar filled. 12%. 47%. 89%.

“What did you do?” he whispered.

“Nothing,” I said. “The caregiver app auto-syncs. It’s been uploading to the hospice server all night.”

100%.

The screen went calm. Upload complete.

Dean looked at me. His face was terrible. Not angry. Not cold. Just ruined.

“I did it for us,” he said.

Behind him, the milk-house door slammed open. Priss stood there, soaked and wild-eyed, her coveralls dark with rain.

“Did she send it?” Priss screamed. “Did she send it?”

Dean didn’t answer. He just stood there with my phone in his hand, the truth already gone from his reach.

Priss lunged for the phone. Dean turned, and for a second they struggled. I grabbed the phone from his loosened grip. He let me. Maybe he thought he could still talk me out of it. Maybe he was too stunned to stop me.

I backed toward the door, phone clutched to my chest. The screen showed the uploaded file. Full recording. 4:31 to 7:05. Dean’s voice. Priss’s voice. The syringe. The lies. The plan.

Ice rain hammered the roof. Priss screamed again. Dean sank onto the milk-house stool and put his head in his hands.

I ran for the house.