Page 71 of Here One Moment

“It’s only money, babe,” says Dom when he finds Eve crying, her phone pressed to her collarbone. “We’ll work it out. What is it? Another bill?”

She has played the video at least five times, as if hoping something different will happen. It feels like her heart is breaking and she doesn’t know this girl, so her heart has no right to break!

“No, it’s nothing to do with money.” Eve wipes her disgusting snotty nose with the back of her hand. Her teeth are chattering. It’s a cold day and they’re trying to save money by not turning on the heating because every volt of electricity, or whatever you call it, costs so much. “It’s that girl from the plane. She…she…”

She can’t speak. She is remembering Kayla at the baggage carousel, touching the lace on Eve’s wedding dress with that delicate fingertip and then how she touched her hair when she talked to the tall boy.

“I don’t want to be famous,” she’d said, when Eve told her Kayla Halfpenny sounded like it could be the name of a famous person, and now she’s gone viral.

Dom takes the phone.

He watches the video and she watches his face, and then she thinks to herself, Oh, Eve, you stupid, stupid girl.

Chapter 63

A “hard determinist,” like the bearded man, would say the driver responsible for Kayla Halfpenny’s death could only have behaved as he actually did. His actions were the inevitable result of a genetic tendency toward alcoholism, perhaps, along with a childhood that gave him little or no moral code, an argument with a girlfriend that brought up infantile memories of abandonment, leading him to drink all through the night and then get behind the wheel the following morning.

A series of inevitably falling dominoes.

However, I was taught God gave us free will, and although I have complicated feelings about the existence of God, I believe in free will.

That man chose to drink and drive.

He could have stopped that last domino.

I hate him for making my dreadful prediction come true.

I hate him for making me accurate.

Chapter 64

Ethan is in his bedroom with the door shut, avoiding Jasmine’s buffoon of a new boyfriend, when the text comes from Leo.

He has him saved as Leo Anxious Flight Guy.

He texts old-person style. Fully punctuated sentences.

Hi Ethan, it’s Leo here, from the Hobart flight. We shared a taxi home. I just wondered if you had seen the distressing video doing the rounds on the internet? Wondering if it’s fake?

Ethan has seen it. He nearly scrolled past it, but something made him stop. Maybe he subconsciously recognized the girl from the plane. It seems genuine. He checked and found a Tasmanian news site reporting the accident. Woman killed, another in critical condition after two-vehicle crash. He suspects Leo knows perfectly well it’s not fake.

He answers: Yes. Very bad. Reckon pure chance lady got one right?

Leo answers: Yes. Not worried yet! Remind me when you turn thirty?

Ethan answers: Oct 1. Not long! Will be watching my back! When u 43?

Leo answers: Nov12. Keep in touch, mate.

Ethan can’t seem to make himself feel properly frightened. He’s still skeptical, or at least relatively skeptical. It just feels so unlikely he and Harvey would both die young. Wouldn’t that be too much of a coincidence? Statistically unlikely?

He thinks about a long-ago statistics class where the lecturer asked students to estimate how many people in the packed hall shared the same birthday. Nobody was even close. The lecturer said everyone always gets it wrong. They wildly underestimate the likelihood because people have a tendency to put themselves at the center of the universe.

It’s called “the birthday paradox.” You think, What is the probability someone else in this room will have the same birthday as ME? You don’t think of all the possible permutations.

In fact, there is close to a one hundred percent chance that at least two people will share a birthday when there are just seventy-five people in a room.

Ethan is not the center of the universe.

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