Read The Accident for Free Online

this anonymous manuscript that’s ruining my weekend .
    “It’s not on your laptop? At home?”
    This makes Alexis nervous in a new way. Why should Isabel care where the reader’s report was written? “No …”
    “And do you have a copy of the manuscript? At home? Or in the office? Did you make yourself a photocopy?”
    Alexis says a knee-jerk “No” while staring at her copy sitting right in front of her. She’d made this set of pages because she was sort of hoping she’d be allowed to run with this project—utter slush, with no referral—herself. But this hope was obviously irrational. Another misjudgment. It’s hard to see clearly with ambition clouding your eyes.
    “Okay,” Isabel says. “Okay, thanks. I guess that’s it for now. I’ll be in by nine-thirty. See you then.”
    Alexis’s heart sinks. “Not today” meekly. “Remember?”
    A long, painful pause. “Oh.” Isabel hadn’t remembered. “Personal day?”
    “Yeah … doctor’s appointment, errands … Is that still okay?”
    “Sure, fine.” Though it doesn’t sound like it. “See you tomorrow.”
    Alexis takes a deep breath, overwhelmed by all the lies she just told.
    She retrieves her handbag from the bedside. Spencer is still snoring, oblivious. She rummages around for the British woman’s card—her name is apparently Camilla—and turns it over to the scrawled cell number. Sometimes, Alexis’s job seems like an endless series of humiliating calls. She takes a deep, steadying breath, and places yet another one.

CHAPTER 5
    T he video on the screen is surprisingly sharp, a close-up of a woman who seems to be staring directly at him. He can’t see her hands, but he knows they’re down there somewhere, typing and clicking and scrolling. All he can see is her face, framed by blonde hair, shorter than it used to be, but still elegant, in an effortless-looking way that he knows requires considerable effort.
    Suddenly the image goes black as the woman folds shut her laptop; he does too. He’d watched her for too long, and now he’s running late. He grabs his small duffel and leaves the apartment and tosses the bag onto the passenger seat of the little two-seater Audi. When he’d arrived in Zurich, he’d discovered it was surprisingly challenging to lease a car without a prohibitive level of credit reports and identity checks; if there’s one thing that can be said about the Swiss, it’s that they’re sticklers. So it was simpler and safer to buy the damn thing. And because he couldn’t imagine that he’d own this new car for more than a few months, or that he’d ever have a backseat passenger, he chose a sleek fast car with no backseat, just like any other well-off bachelor would.
    He guns the engine, and speeds through the tidy streets of lakeside Seefeld, big tall nineteenth-century houses and stout little twentieth-century apartment buildings, well-pruned trees and carefully tendedgardens, and the predictable assortment of boutiques and banks and restaurants and bars on a main European drag such as Seefeldstrasse, in a neighborhood called the Gold Coast, in a city like Zurich.
    This car handles well on the climbing and dipping curves, and he allows himself to have fun with it, driving much faster here in the Alpine foothills than he ever would, back home. He’ll probably never drive in America again. Can’t imagine he’ll ever be there again. By all accounts, he’s already dead.
    I .
    He can’t stop obsessing over that missed pronoun. He’d been so careful, so rigorous, about everything. About the Piper crash and the little motorboat and the international flights. He’d been meticulous about passports and money, about hair and eyes and clothing and shoes, about surgeries and recoveries. He’d made logistically complex arrangements in America, in Denmark and Germany and Switzerland, in Mexico. He’d plotted out precise and possibly futile contingency plans that involved France, Italy, Kenya, and