I stood over her body, rage and terror stealing the breath from my lungs. Her clothes were caked with mud, her cheeks mascara-streaked with tears of panic, the small crimson blotch too insignificant to be the cause of death. A single bullet guided by fate, front to back with the briefest rendezvous at the heart. Her face paled as blood trickled onto the railroad tie and down the gravel embankment.
“They probably just meant to scare her.” Alex was standing behind me, grief etching lines between the scars of his face. “Bill can’t aim like that, not from thirty yards through pine trees.” Alex swore by the power of words. Engage the left brain, he would say. Anything to let emotion from taking over. “Jed must have been with him. You know how he gets when he’s drunk. It must have been an accident. It must have…”
Words. I parted my lips and felt my left brain slip out of gear, saw the shredded tires of my logic, felt fire as my right brain hijacked my speech. Reason exploded into flame and I turned to face Alex.
“An accident.” His eyes teared, not for a moment fooled by the control in my voice. And then even the dripping sarcasm ignited. “She was everything.” I knelt again, pressed my hand against the soft skin of her neck. The fire died, and my voice turned to ash. “To me, she was everything.”