Rebecca’s POV
I called Olivia from the car.
Not immediately. I sat with it for twenty minutes first, with the certainty that had settled in my chest on that pavement and the specific quality of silence that comes after you have seen the thing you needed to see and no longer have the option of unseeing it.
I sat with it until I was sure of myself in the way I needed to be sure before I said any of this out loud. Because saying it out loud would make it real in a way it hadn’t been before, even though it was already real, even though I had just watched it with my own eyes, without my sunglasses, without anything between me and the truth of it.
There is a version of real that lives in your body before it lives in your mouth.
I needed to cross that distance first.
By the time I called
