My twin sister d*ed in a fiery highway wreck a decade ago — so why did a dental office call last Monday asking me to drive over and collect her from the lobby?

I sat back down on the couch. "Say that again."

"He was on that road because he knew I'd be on it." She stayed standing. She seemed to need the space between us. "I'd told someone — a friend, someone I thought I could trust — that I was driving out that night to meet a lawyer. Somebody who was going to help me leave Adrian quietly. Legally."

"He found out."

"She told him. I don't know if she was scared, or he paid her, or she just didn't get what she was doing." Nora shook her head. "Doesn't matter now. He knew. And he came after me."

"And the car going off the road—"

"He ran me off it." Not a tremble in it. "He pulled up beside me on that highway and he crowded me toward the edge until I lost the wheel. The car went through the guardrail." A pause. "I remember the drop. I remember the fire starting under the hood. And I remember his face in the window."

I couldn't get a word out.

"He looked at me," Nora said, "and he made a decision. He pulled me out. And I've spent ten years trying to work out whether that was mercy, or whether he just decided a live woman was worth more to him than a dead one."

"Because you can't threaten a dead woman."

"Because you can't run a dead woman." She finally sat, across from me. "He needed me scared. He needed me to owe him my whole life. And it worked." She looked at her hands. "Ten years, it worked."

I thought about our mother. The closed casket. The two years she cried and the years after that when she just went quiet, and the phone call telling me she was gone too.

"He took her from us," I said. "Not just you. He took Mom."

Nora's face buckled for a second before she hauled it back together. "I know."

"Does he know she died?"

"I don't know what he knows about your life. I made myself not look. It was safer not to."

I got up. I needed to be moving. I went to the window and looked down at the street — regular afternoon, regular cars, nothing that read as a threat.

But I didn't know what his car looked like. I didn't know his face. I was hunting for a man I had never once seen.

"We go to the police," I said.

"With what?" Her voice was quiet, not sharp. "My word? I've lived under a fake name for ten years. The minute I walk in, I have to explain all of it. And Adrian has people, Erin. Lawyers. Records he's kept — real ones and ones he built. He'll paint me as a woman who faked her own death for the payout and is now throwing dirt to save herself."

"Was there a payout?"

A pause. "There was a policy. Our parents took it out when we were kids. It paid after the funeral." She met my eyes. "I never touched a dollar of it. But Adrian knows it existed."

I turned from the window. "So he's got leverage either way."

"He's always got leverage either way. That's the whole trick." She leaned in. "But what I told him on the phone — Marisol, the others — that's real. I have names. Dates. Things I've been collecting for ten years because I always knew this day might come." She looked at me steady. "I just never knew if I'd have the nerve to use them."

"Do you?" I asked. "Have the nerve?"

She didn't answer right away.

My phone buzzed on the kitchen counter.

A text. Unknown number — a different one from the calls.