Page 3 of Bird on a Blade

When you get overwhelmed,Dr. Valunzuela always says,deep breaths. Clear your thoughts.

I’m not exactly overwhelmed right now, but I do it anyway.

Four deep breaths.

Empty my head.

Listen to my body.

I pull the keys out of the ignition and step out of the car. It feels good to move after four hours on the road, winding through the Appalachian Mountains without stopping so Icould just get here and know if I’d made the right choice, booking a two-month-long stay at the site of the infamous Fat Camp Killing Spree, as the website had so helpfully categorized this particular short-term rental.

God, I hate that fucking name.

It’s September, and the air is cool and breezy. The camp’s more peaceful than I’ve ever known it—certainly more peaceful than it was the last time I was here, covered in Sawyer Caldwell’s blood and brain matter while cops and EMTs and tenacious locals swarmed around in the pinkish dawnlight.

I shove the memory aside, something that became second nature years ago when the Fat Camp Killing Spree was still the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I pull out my suitcase—sparsely packed with a few essentials I bought before I fled the Bay Area—and drag it up to the counselors’ cabin. I’ve never actually been in here, despite being a regular at this place back when it was still Head Start Fitness Camp and not justthat fat camp where a bunch of people died. The keypad works like the instructions said it would, and when I push into the cabin, I’m pleasantly surprised by how clean and neat it is. An overstuffed couch in the common area. A big flat-screen TV. Pots and pans in the kitchen. A Keurig machine on the counter. I’ll need to go into town for groceries.

The only thing that ruins the decor are the framed newspaper articles on the wall about the murders. The one in the kitchen even has a picture of me, my school picture, eighteen-year-old Edie smiling like she doesn’t hate herself next to a big black headline screaming,Four Dead, One Survivor in Brutal Slayings.

I take it off the wall and slide it in the gap between the counter and the refrigerator.

Only one person who knows who I am knows that I’m here: my best friend Charlotte, who helped me with the preparations inthose frantic hours after my husband—ex-husband?—Scott nearly killed me. I’d been planning to leave for good, and he found out.

When I told her where I wanted to go, she had been driving me into San Francisco so I could buy a car in cash, the sun just starting to stain the sky with a rosé sunrise. My left eye was swollen completely shut, instead of partially shut, like it is now. My voice still rasped from where he nearly crushed my trachea.

Charlotte’s mouth dropped open and she hissed, “Are you fucking insane?”

But I only shrugged. “It’s the last place he’ll ever look for me.”

“Until it’s all over the fucking Internet that Edie Astor’s back at the site of the murders!”

I stared out at the blur of a highway. My entire body ached—that’s what I remember most. “I’ll use a different name,” I said numbly. “It’s been fifteen years. No one in town’s going to recognize me.”

“What’s the real reason?”

“I told you. It’s the last place Scott will look for me.” Because he had known all the places to look for me in California. Sent his PIs trailing me to my therapy appointments, my shopping trips. I couldn’t go anywhere without Scott watching me.

But I knew, even then, he wouldn’t find me in Virginia.

“Besides—” I turned toward her. She was squeezing the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the road, worry lines creasing in her brow. “I need the reminder of what I’m capable of surviving.”

I think that was what did it. She nodded and sank back into the car seat. Six hours later, I was driving south down I-5, through the desert. Alone.

I hadn’t lied to Charlotte. All the memories of that night, all the blood, the screaming?—

the killer

—it feels so far away now. Something terrible happened to me, yes, but I walked away from it. I’d been face to face with the now-infamous killer Sawyer Caldwell himself and survived without so much as a bruise.

Not that I ever, ever told anyone what that encounter had really been like. Not even Charlotte.

I have bruises now, though, even four days later. All over my wrists, ringing around my neck. The swelling in my eye has gone down enough that I can see out of it, at least, but I’ll need to wear sunglasses in town. They’ll hide the cut on my cheek, too, from where Scott’s ring sliced me open.

I saw Sawyer Caldwell’s knife dripping with blood, but it was my husband’s wedding ring that actually cut me.

Four deep breaths. I count them in my head. When I’m done, I text Charlotte to let her know I’ve arrived, and then I wheel my suitcase into the hallway and pick the largest of the bedrooms, the head counselor’s room. It would have belonged to Lindsay Kirtle fifteen years ago, but she hadn’t been there that night.

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