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the water out of my eyes, but only succeeded in smearing mud all over my face.
    “Sabine,” the woman said, “you’ve got to stop doing this.”
    The flashlight lit up the woman’s face. My mouth fell open.

8
     
     
     
     
    I sat in front of the fire, cradling a mug of hot chocolate in my hands. I stared into the dark liquid and tried to remember: did this feel familiar? I sipped from my drink and winced. It was scalding hot, but it felt amazing in my stomach.
    The woman returned with an ice pack.
    “Here you go,” she said, handing it to me.
    Afraid to meet her eyes, I took it from her shyly. I placed the ice pack on my filthy knee. My legs were streaked with drying mud.
    “Thank you,” I said timidly.
    The woman shrugged and waved her hand in the air, dismissing my gratitude.
    “You don’t remember me, do you?”
    I stared at her blankly. She was an older woman with severe, dark eyes and long gray hair she wore parted on the side. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. The woman frowned and sat down heavily in a recliner beside the fire.
    “That’s okay. You never remember. We’ve had this discussion before,” she said.
    “When?”
    “Last time was about a month ago. Before that, about six weeks. You have a habit of coming out here during storms.”
    “I don’t understand. How did I get out here?”
    “Sleepwalking as far as I can tell. You always seem to be in a trance. When I try to wake you up, you scream and fight me, start yelling for Tom to help you.”
    I swallowed hard. This woman knew about Tom. I drank from my mug to try and hide the expression on my face. I was horrified by the idea of coming out here in the dark. I had no memory of it at all.
    The woman leaned back in her recliner and started to speak. She sounded as if she was reading a script. It wasn’t the first time she’d repeated this story to me.
    “I live here by the lake. I keep late hours for reasons that are my own.”
    There was edge to her voice that warned me not to ask why.
    “The first time we met was the night your husband died. You were out there wandering around the bridge in such a state I thought you’d escaped from the mental institution outside of town. You were babbling nonsense. I brought you back here and managed to get your address out of you. I drove you home an hour later. That morning I woke to sirens and lights. My whole backyard was covered with search and rescue and law enforcement. They were searching the lake. I found out later they’d discovered a body. Immediately, I thought of you. I figured you killed your husband. Maybe he was treating you badly and you’d had enough.”
    The woman shrugged as if it this was a totally reasonable excuse for killing your husband.
    “In any case, it’s no business of mine. The cops came around here asking me if I’d seen or heard anything the night before. I said no. I’ve known plenty of women who had good reason for murdering their husbands. I’d hate to see one of them go to prison for it. Besides, I don’t like the police. I don’t get involved with them under any circumstances.”
    There was a hardness to the woman that spoke of a rough life. Had she been involved in criminal activity? Clearly, she’d had issues with men. Why else would she be so ready to forgive a woman for getting rid of her spouse?
    “I didn’t think about it anymore until a month later when I found you wandering around in the dark out there. It was raining and you were half frozen. I invited you in to warm up. I tried to get you to fess up about what really happened out there, but you had no idea what I was talking about. You kept on insisting Tom was still alive.”
    The woman shook her head as if she was saddened by this.
    “I find you out here every so often when there’s a storm. It’s gotten to be so frequent that I come looking for you every time there’s bad weather. Sure enough, I find you on the bridge, sleepwalking.”
    It was a lot to digest. I