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.

But then her eyes fell on the little girl behind the cracked windshield, on the verge of an Addisonian crisis. An anxiety-time bomb; a single bad moment away from a seizure, or a coma, or worse. So Darby dropped to her bruised knees and started to dig.

Death is supposed to transform you from a person into an idea.

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