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self-serving lie.
    I had painted myself into a corner and I didn’t know how to get out of it. I didn’t know if I could reinvent myself. I didn’t think I had the strength or the will to do it. Hiding in my own private purgatory required no strength.
    I fully realized how pathetic that was. And I had spent a lot of nights in the past two years wondering if being dead wasn’t preferable to being pathetic. So far I had decided the answer was no. Being alive at least presented the possibility for improvement.
    Was Erin Seabright somewhere thinking the same thing? I wondered. Or was it already too late? Or had she found the one circumstance to which death was preferable but not an option?
    I had been a cop a long time. I had started my career in a West Palm Beach radio car, patrolling neighborhoods where crime was a common career choice and drugs could be purchased on the street in broad daylight. I had done a stint in Vice, viewing the businesses of prostitution and pornography up close and personal. I had spent years working narcotics for the Sheriff’s Office.
    I had a head full of images of the dire consequences of being a young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. South Florida offered a lot of places to get rid of bodies or hide ugly secrets. Wellington was an oasis of civilization, but the land beyond the gated communities was more like the land that time forgot. Swamp and woods. Open, hostile scrubland and sugarcane fields. Dirt roads and rednecks and biker meth labs in trailer houses that should have been left to the rats twenty years past. Canals and drainage ditches full of dirty black water and alligators happy to make a meal of any kind of meat.
    Was Erin Seabright out there somewhere waiting for someone to save her? Waiting for me? God help her. I didn’t want to go.
    I went into the bathroom and washed my hands and splashed water on my face. Trying to wash away any feelings of obligation. I could feel the water only on the right side of my face. Nerves on the left side had been damaged, leaving me with limited feeling and movement. The plastic surgeons had given me a suitably neutral expression, a job so well done no one suspected anything wrong with me other than a lack of emotion.
    The calm, blank expression stared back at me now in the mirror. Another reminder that no aspect of me was whole or normal. And I was supposed to be Erin Seabright’s savior?
    I hit the mirror with the heels of my fists, once, then again and again, wishing my image would shatter before my eyes as surely as it had shattered within me two years ago. Another part of me wanted the sharp cut of pain, the cleansing symbolized in shed blood. I wanted to bleed to know I existed. I wanted to vanish to escape the pain. The contradictory forces shoved against one another inside me, crowding my lungs, pushing up against my brain.
    I went to the kitchen and stared at the knife block on the counter and my car keys lying beside it.
    Life can change in a heartbeat of time, in a hairsbreadth of space. Without our consent. I had already known that to be the truth. In my deepest heart I suppose I knew it to be true in that moment, that night. I preferred to believe I picked up the keys and left the house to escape my own self-torment. That idea allowed me to continue to believe I was selfish.
    In truth, the choice I made that night wasn’t safe at all. In truth, I chose to move forward. I tricked myself into choosing life over purgatory.
    Before it was all over, I feared I might live to regret it—or die trying.

3
    Palm Beach Polo Equestrian Center is like a small sovereign nation, complete with royalty and guards at the gates. At the front gates. The back gates stood open during the day and could be reached from Sean’s farm by car in five minutes. People from the neighborhood regularly hacked their horses over on show days and saved themselves the cost of stabling—ninety dollars a weekend for a pipe-and-canvas stall in a circus tent