3: 3

"Letitia, what's taking you so long? Mom's stomach is acting up again. Which bag did you put her regular meds in before we left? Bring them over here, now!"

The voice crackled out of the megaphone, laced with a harsh burst of static, echoing through the dark.

Nothing but trouble, that girl. Now of all times, still throwing her little princess fit. She's sulking because we took June out first, hiding up on some high ground and refusing to come down. If she makes Mom miss her medicine, I'll deal with her.

That was my brother's voice inside his head.

The last faint thread of hope scattered into nothing.

I stopped fighting.

I let the freezing floodwater pour into my lungs, let the crushing weight of it tear at my eardrums.

The second my heart stopped, the world finally went quiet.

When I opened my eyes again, I couldn't feel the cold anymore.

My body lay still in a pile of rubble downstream, my face bruised blue, all life gone from it.

But my soul drifted, weightless, in the air.

I followed that thin thread of lingering will and floated back to the disaster relief shelter at the foot of the hill.

Inside the tent, the lights blazed.

Mom lay on a folding cot, clutching her stomach and moaning.

June had changed into clean, warm clothes and sat by the bed, her eyes rimmed red.

"Dad, Elmer, it's all my fault." June wiped at her tears, her voice catching.

"Nia must be angry that I got the seat on the rescue boat. Before we went into the water, I saw it with my own eyes—she tucked Mom's stomach medicine into her own coat. The way she looked at me then was so frightening. Is she doing this to punish me?"

Mom heard it and shot upright, slamming her hand down on the cot.

"That wicked girl! She wants me to die in agony, doesn't she! Over some petty jealousy, she'd throw away her own mother's life!"

Dad's face went as dark as the sky before a storm, and he lurched to his feet.

"I'm going downstream to look. And I'll drag that ungrateful girl back while I'm at it!"

I hovered in the air, watching Dad storm out.

When he reached the riverbank in front of the shelter, he was actually less than two hundred meters from the pile of rubble where I'd died.

A few more steps forward, one glance in the direction of the current, and he would have seen the torn hem of my clothes.

But then June's scream rang out from inside the tent: "Ah! My foot hurts so much—I think I just twisted it!"

Dad's steps stopped dead.

He didn't even turn his head. He spun around at once and hurried back to the tent, cradling June's ankle carefully to check it, his eyes full of worry for her.

4: 4

By dawn the next morning, the storm had finally broken. The floodwater that had raged all night was slipping away, leaving mud and wreckage everywhere it went.

Inside the shelter, though, the mood had dropped below freezing.

June was curled against Sebastian's chest, face pale, pointing at a post on her phone and crying prettily, tears spilling like petals in the rain.

"Elmer, look. Blake Finch from the next town over posted this last night, and the background looks like the little motel in town. Nia... did she leave with some other guy last night? How could she do something like that, when Sebastian's still out there looking everywhere for her?"

Sebastian took the phone, and his face went hard in an instant.

*Letitia, that shameless woman. The whole family is here worrying itself sick over her, and this is what she does—running off to a motel with another man just to get back at me. I really misjudged her. She couldn't even bring herself to grab one bracelet for June, and her heart turns out to be this vicious, this low.*

Elmer shot to his feet and slammed a fist down on the table.

"The nerve! Our whole family bent over backwards for her, gave in to her every mood, and this is how she repays us? Humiliating the Swanson name like this?"

Their father's face darkened as he threw his jacket over his shoulder.

"Let's go. To the motel in town. Today I'm dragging that ungrateful thing back here, and I'll make her kneel and apologize to June, right in front of Sebastian!"

Their mother pushed herself up on her weak body too. "I'm going too! I want to see for myself just what kind of selfish, ungrateful animal I raised!"

The five of them set off downstream, righteous and seething, wearing the faces of judges who had already handed down the verdict.

In their eyes, I was surely hiding out in some warm room right now, guilty and content, savoring the thrill of betraying my family.

Up ahead, on the riverbank, several rescue workers in orange uniforms had gathered in a tight cluster.

From a pile of stones the water had just left behind, they had hauled up together a heavy shape wrapped in plastic sheeting.

The captain leading them turned around, straight into my seething father, glanced at the family photo in his hand that they'd been using to search, and came toward them with a grave look on his face.

"Excuse me. Are you Letitia's family? If you are, I'll need you to come identify the body."