Sophie Pov
The first shovel of dirt hit the coffin before I realized I had stopped breathing.
I stood at the edge of the grave in a black dress that belonged to my aunt and shoes that were a size too small and I could not move. The priest was still talking. His voice reached me in pieces, words about peace and rest and the mercy of God, and none of it sounded real. My mother was in that box. My father was in the one beside it. Both of them went into the ground on the same Tuesday and nobody around me could look me in the eye.
My cousin Adele squeezed my arm once and then stepped back. My uncle did not even do that much. He stood on the other side of the grave with his hands folded and his eyes on the ground for the entire service.
After the burial there was food at the house. Relatives I had not seen in years filled the kitchen and the sitting room and talked about my parents in the past tense with practiced ease, like they had been rehearsing for it. I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall and nobody came to me. Nobody said my mother's name or my father's name. They said the car and the road and the report and the accident. They said it cleanly and moved on to other sentences.
My aunt Bernice found me near the window.
"You should eat something," she said.
"I am not hungry," I said.
"You need to keep your strength," she said.
"Bernice," I said. "Did you know something was wrong before it happened."
She looked at me. Her eyes went very still. "What kind of question is that."
"The kind I need an answer to," I said.
She set her plate down on the windowsill. "Your parents died in a car accident, Sophie. It is a terrible thing. But it was an accident."
She walked away before I could say anything else.
I did not cry at the graveside. Something inside me had broken before I got there.
That night I sat in my parents' house with a glass of water I had not touched and the official autopsy report on the table in front of me. The police had brought it that morning. One sheet of paper. Two names. Cause of death listed as blunt force trauma consistent with vehicular collision. Ruled accidental. Case closed.
I read it three times.
Then I folded it and put it in my pocket because something about it was wrong and I could not name what it was yet but I knew it the same way I had known at nine that the locked room at the back of the house was not a storage room. My father always drove with both hands. He checked his mirrors twice at every turn. He had never in my entire life run a red light. The road where they died was one he had driven five hundred times.
I sat with that thought until the house went quiet.
Then I heard voices outside.
Two men stood near the side gate. I moved to the window without turning the light on and watched them through the gap in the curtain. I did not recognize either of them. They were not dressed like mourners. One held a phone and read from it. The other had his hands in his coat pockets and was looking at the front door.
I cracked the window open one inch.
"The daughter is still inside," the one with the phone said.
"She needs to be handled the same way," the other one said. He did not lower his voice. He was not concerned about being heard. "That was the agreement. All three of them."
"We give it a few days," the first one said. "Let the dust settle. Then we move."
I closed the window.
I stood in the dark with my hand pressed flat against the wall and my heart beating so loud I could hear it. I thought about the autopsy report in my pocket. I thought about the way the police officer who dropped it off had refused to come inside. I thought about my uncle calling it a tragedy and then immediately asking about the will.
My parents were murdered.
I had already known it before tonight. Hearing it out loud in someone else's voice just removed the last door between knowing and accepting.
I went upstairs. I took one bag, the smaller one, and filled it with everything that mattered. My documents. The emergency money my mother kept in the box behind the winter coats. Two changes of clothes. The photograph of my parents from the shelf beside my bed. I did not take anything heavy or slow.
I was out of the house before four in the morning.
The street was dark and quiet. I walked fast without running because running drew attention and I had no country to run to, only away from the one I was leaving. I cried the whole way to the meeting point and covered my mouth with both hands so no sound came out. The grief was enormous. It sat on my chest the whole walk and I could not put it down and I could not stop moving so I carried it with me.
The truck was parked behind a warehouse near the port. Six other people were already inside when I climbed in. Nobody looked at each other. I paid the man at the door almost everything I had left and he nodded and said nothing and closed the door behind me.
I sat in the dark with strangers and thought about nothing except staying alive.
The truck pulled away from the warehouse.
I looked back through a small gap in the canvas at the street, at the direction of the house, at the country I had grown up in and the life that had ended in two days. The road was empty for a moment. Then headlights appeared at the far end of the street and a black car turned the corner and pulled into my parents' driveway.
Three men got out.
One of them stood at the front door and held up his phone. Even from that distance the screen was bright with a photograph.
I knew without seeing it what photograph it was.
His voice carried in the quiet street before the truck moved too far for me to hear.
"Find the girl."