They let me go, with Rowan warning me not to leave town, saying it the way people do in old cowboy movies, as if this place were anything more than a stretch of bad road, a dirty river, and a broken bridge.
What town was there to leave, anyway, and where would I even go?
Home felt wrong as soon as I stepped inside.
The couch ghost was still there, the white dusty shape on the floor that I kept circling as if it might spring shut if I crossed it too closely.
My mom was still at work, and the house smelled like old frying oil mixed with the sharp lemon cleaner she uses, the two scents clashing until neither one could win.
I sat at the table with the wobbly leg and rocked it back and forth, letting the creak settle into a rhythm while my head buzzed with noise that wasn't quite thoughts, just a swarm of pressure with nowhere to land.
Krivya.
Her name formed itself carefully in my mouth—Kriv-ya, two syllables, a hard beginning and a soft ending and I wondered who had chosen it and whether they could have imagined it would someday exist only in notebooks and police files.
I stood and paced, three steps to the fridge and two to the sink, where a drip fell every seven seconds, steady enough that I counted it without meaning to.
The clock on the wall said 2:15 even though it was really 4:30, its dying battery making the second hand jerk forward and freeze, then move again, like it was afraid of continuing.
I needed air, something cleaner than the thick, stagnant air trapped inside the house, so I put on my shoes, ignored the uneven laces, and went outside.
The street was quiet under the afternoon sun, shadows stretching everything out until it looked distorted, like a funhouse reflection, my own shadow swollen into a giant body with a tiny head as I walked without any destination in mind.
Without asking me, my feet carried me to the bridge.
I didn't stand where she had stood, but on the opposite side, gripping the cold iron railing as flakes of red paint rubbed off on my hands, dry and powdery like old blood.
I wiped them on my pants and leaned forward to look down at the water.
The river crawled past, brown and sluggish, carrying a plastic bag that looked like a dead jellyfish, while farther downstream a shopping cart lay stuck in the mud with only its top visible, a metal skeleton reaching up.
This was where it happened, or where it had been done to her.
They had explained the air embolism carefully: the needle, the syringe filled with nothing but air, pushed into the right vein so the bubble could travel to the heart, where it would stop everything without blood or mess, maybe even without a scream.
I tried to imagine what she felt whether there was a coldness moving up her arm, whether dizziness came first, whether she looked at the river and thought goodbye.
Why here, on this bridge, with this ugly view of rusted water and a half-dead factory with broken windows?
Maybe she liked it, or maybe ugly places felt more honest.
A car roared past and the bridge trembled, the vibration running through the iron and into my teeth.
I turned to leave, and that was when I noticed something near the edge where the bridge met the land: a flash of blue among the weeds.
I crouched, ignoring the itch of the plants and the stickers clinging to my pants, and saw that it was a hair tie and a blue scrunchie dotted with tiny white specks like a miniature night sky, dirty with dust but not old or rotting.
Krivya's hair had been silver-white, almost glowing.
Would she have worn blue for contrast?
It seemed possible.
I didn't touch it, just stared at it, already thinking of it as evidence and imagining Rowan's tired sigh if I called him to report finding a hair accessory.
In the end, I left it where it was, brushed myself off, and walked home with the weeds still clinging to me.
On the way back, my mind started playing its movie, the bad kind that doesn't ask permission.
It was night in the scene, and Krivya stood on the bridge with the blue scrunchie holding her hair back while the wind pulled loose strands around her face.
She was waiting, and I knew it was for me.
I arrived as the version of myself from the photo, hands in my pockets, wearing that small, empty smile, and I couldn't tell what we talked about..weather, meaning, nothing at all or whether the syringe was already in my pocket, whether she saw it when I took it out, whether she turned her head and offered her neck like a trust fall.
There was no struggle in the story, because they said there were no marks.
Maybe she had the syringe and handed it to me, telling me she was tired, and maybe I took it not out of cruelty but curiosity, just wanting to see what would happen next.
The thought made me nauseous, and I stopped walking to lean against a brick wall still warm from the sun, grounding myself in the roughness of it.
I hadn't been there.
I couldn't have been.
I had been home, in my room, watching TV—something, anything—but when I tried to remember what had been on, there was only blankness.
The blank was the worst part, a hole wide enough to fall into.
When I got home, my mom was cutting vegetables, the steady chop of the knife filling the kitchen as she asked where I'd been without looking up.
I told her I'd been walking, and she mentioned that the detective had called, polite but thorough, asking about my habits, whether I sleepwalked, whether I'd ever talked about hurting things.
The knife paused before coming down harder, and when I asked what she told him, she said she told the truth that her son was a good boy, confused and dreamy, not a hurt-er, a word that sounded too small to fit what it was trying to describe.
That night, sleep wouldn't settle, my thoughts sliding between sounds and images until everything blurred together, and when the certainty finally arrived, it did so without words, heavy and undeniable.
You were not alone on the bridge.
It wasn't a voice or a vision, just knowledge, as solid as a weight in my gut, telling me that someone else had been there, watching from outside the frame.