"I am driving," she said, "and you are going to sit in the passenger seat, and you are going to tell me everything, and if you lie to me one more time tonight I will pull over on the shoulder of Route 9 and leave you there. Do you understand me?"
He stood. He found his keys, which had been in his shorts pocket the entire time, and something about that, about the stupid ordinary fact of the missing keys that had never been missing, made her want to scream until the lockers rang.
"I understand," he said.
On the way through the main floor they passed the mop bucket, half full, sitting in the middle of the rubber mats where he'd left it. The overhead fluorescents buzzed. Kristen stopped at the front desk and did the thing she always did, the thing she had done for six years: she checked that the back door was locked, she flipped the sign, she turned off the music system that was still playing something soft and synthetic to an empty room. Her hands did it on their own. It was the last ordinary thing for a long time.
In the parking lot, Opal Brandt was loading a yoga mat into the back of her hatchback under the one working light. She had been in the six-thirty class with Kristen for four years, a big laughing woman who taught middle school science and carried peppermints in every pocket. She looked up and waved, and then she saw Kristen's face and stopped waving.
"Hey," Opal said. "Hey, what happened?"
"Family thing," Kristen said. "My sister."
Opal's eyes went to Brock, standing at the passenger door like a man waiting outside a principal's office, and back to Kristen. Something passed through her expression that Kristen would think about later: not curiosity, but a kind of practical assessment, the look of a woman counting exits.
"You okay to drive?"
"Yes."
"Text me when you get where you're going," Opal said. "I mean it. Just a thumbs up. I'll be up."
"Okay."
"Kris."
"I said okay."