No Exit

by Taylor Adams

No panic, no fight, no flight, just that shivery little moment when daily life goes rancid.

“Trying again to get a cell signal. My mom’s got pancreatic cancer and she’s in a hospital in Provo.” Without giving Ashley time to respond, she stepped outside into the howling storm, flinching against a wall of bone-chilling air, and recalled an offhand little saying she’d heard once from her mother: The easiest lies to tell are the true ones.

There’s refuge in normalcy — if you can hold onto it. Outside Lars’s van, she kept counting.

Darby preferred to live her life wide-eyed, tormented, running, because nothing can catch you if you never stop.

The difference between a hero and a victim? Timing.

“Excuses are poison,” Ed repeated. “Doing the right thing is hard. Talking yourself out of it is easy. Does that make sense?”

History doesn’t quite repeat itself, but damn, it sure can rhyme.

Don’t fear the pros, Darby. The pros know what they’re doing, and do it cleanly. Fear the amateurs.

Death is supposed to transform you from a person into an idea. But to Darby, her mother had always been an idea. Somehow, after eighteen years of living in the same tiny two-bedroom house in Provo, eating the same food, watching the same television, sitting on the same sofa, she’d never truly known who Maya Thorne was. Not as a human being. Certainly not as the person she would have been, had Darby never existed. Had she really just been the flu.

Sometimes God puts people exactly where they need to be. Even when they don’t know it.