MY HEART sounds like a monster with clobber feet, running straight toward me. It’s pitch dark. I’m lying on my back, soaked with sweat from the hair on my head to the soles of my feet. I’m lying perfectly still, but my hands and knees won’t stop shaking.
I’m in my grave, and I know I’m going to die here.
It’s only about eighteen inches high, and my forehead is bruised from hitting it more than once. I can feel both sides with my hands if I reach out. Just longer than me, maybe by a foot. I’m claustrophobic. Very claustrophobic.
I saw the coffins. I saw them, and now I’m in one, buried under tons of concrete. It’s all I can think, over and over, and I can’t stop thinking it.
Breathe. Just Breathe, Christy. Close your eyes and breathe .
It’s not like this. It can’t be like this. It’s all a mistake. I have to calm down or I’m going to have a heart attack. It’s all a mistake. They’ll find me. This is Boston, not Africa. People in Boston don’t die like this. People don’t die like this anywhere in America. It’s all a mistake.
This isn’t my grave.
I close my eyes and try to slow my breathing. Try to think different thoughts—not the old ones that keep shoving me under tons of smothering earth. Good thoughts, like the fact that I’m still alive. Like the fact that my imagination has always been my biggest enemy.
Like the fact that it’s all a mistake.
But that’s not true, is it? My whole life is a mistake—one tragic error after another, and this one’s going to be my last.
I’m in a grave, and I’m going to die.
My heart sounds like a monster with clobber feet, running straight toward me. It’s pitch dark. I’m lying on my back, soaked with sweat from the hair on my head to the soles of my feet. I’m lying perfectly still with my eyes closed, trying to think new thoughts, but my hands and knees won’t stop shaking.
How did this happen to me?
—
IT ALL began with a little heart-shaped silver locket, the kind that typically holds a small picture of a smiling boyfriend or a perfectly framed family at their best, frozen in time on photo-reactive paper to be forever cherished.
Christy Snow’s locket held no such image because she had neither a boyfriend nor a perfect family. No family at all, in fact. No mother, no father of her knowing. She was an orphan, age seventeen, disturbingly in the dark about her entire existence prior to age thirteen, when she entered the orphanage.
The picture in her locket was the same black-and-white placeholder that had come with the necklace when she bought it for $19.99 at the Target on Steel Street two years earlier—a constant reminder worn near her heart, a promise that she would one day at least know who her real mother and father were. Maybe even recover her childhood. How could she love herself if she didn’t even know who she was?
It wouldn’t be beyond a psychiatrist to suggest that the silver piece had become her identity. As such, she was lost in the deeply held fear that she didn’t belong. Not to a family, not to a man, not to a friend, not even to herself.
Christy, like the image in her locket, was only a shadow, living as a fraud. Although she did her best to pretend that she was happy with her life, she secretly hated herself for being forgotten by family, by anyone who might have said she belonged or had value.
She took the necklace off only when she went to bed because she tended to toss and turn in fitful nightmares of being thrown away as a child. Twice, she had broken the chain in her sleep. But last night, when she’d reached for the necklace around her neck, it was gone.
A thorough, frantic search of her studio flat had turned up no sign of the locket. She remembered glancing at it before heading out to meet Austin late in the afternoon. The chain must have broken somewhere along the route they’d taken to the old storage room, or in the storage room itself. She would retrace her steps as
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