Glow

• City
• Spring
• 2022

Opening Scene

Nathan is sitting on the couch, TV on, when he hears the ritualistic sound of his wife and son entering through the side door.

“Another successful day at school?” he calls out, without ever looking away from the screen.

“I’d say so! In fact, I think Jacob has something to tell you.”

Curiosity winning over, Nathan searches for the remote hidden somewhere nearby to turn off the TV. Giving up after a mere moment, he rises from the couch (remote falling off his lap as he does so) to greet his family, pondering what the good news could possibly be.

Barely having time to take a step, he hears the screen door open again and the voice of his wife, Jodi.

“Hey! You can’t -“
“Shut up, turn around and head into the living room. Take your son too.”

It is only at this point that Nathan rounds the corner to the connecting hallway to see the situation at hand. An unknown man is pointing a gun directly at his wife. With her son wrapped firmly in her arms, Jodi, eyes wide with fear and trembling from ear to toe, hurriedly rushes towards Nathan and the living room.

“Who are you? Why are you doing this?” Nathan shouts at the unknown gunman, slowly backing out of the hallway. “You can take whatever you need. We won’t cause trouble, just take what you want and leave.” But the man just continues to corral the three towards the living room, seemingly immune to his pleas.

With the four of them finally situated in the living room, just a few feet from where Nathan sat just a few moments ago, the gunman looks directly at him, with, what Nathan believed at the time, to be genuine sadness.

“I’m sorry.”

Part One

I’m sorry. These were the last words Nathan heard before the gunman fired three deafening times. First, aiming at Jodi, and then Jacob, before pointing the gun at himself, pulling the trigger a third and final time.

It’s been five months since that day, and Nathan still has no idea why his world ended. To most of the outside world, he’s holding up as well as could be expected, but rarely a moment passes where his mind doesn’t race, trying to figure out why the shooter chose his family, left him alive.

Why did this monster, who was later identified as Kyle Macedo, take away his family? What did he do to offend this man? Was it mistaken identity? The police were never able to determine a motive.

Haunted by the memories that cling to every corner of his house, Nathan finds no solace in his own bed. Sleep eludes him, replaced by a nightly ritual of drowning his sorrows on the couch in a haze of alcohol and regret. It’s the only way to keep the blinding flashes of lights at bay – the ones he sees in triplets every time he closes his eyes, the three blinding lights of a gun’s muzzle flash.

But this night is not like other nights. This night, he is completely sober, sitting in the car he used to love so much, waiting for the light to turn green.

Despite having no destination in mind, he finds himself racing on the roads along the escarpment, driving faster and faster, just waiting for the one inevitable outcome.

The next thing Nathan is aware of is a jarring noise as his door rips away, flung open like a discarded shell. He feels himself being lifted out of the car and onto a stretcher, vaguely aware of the concerned paramedics trying to communicate. As the ambulance lurches over uneven roads, a single thought piercing the fog before it fades: Was it worth it?

Awakening in a brightly lit room, mouth parched, head throbbing in pain to the beat of his heart, Nathan takes a moment to get his bearings before releasing a cry for help, voice crackling in pain.

Moments later, a nurse appears, her face framed by the harsh glow of an overhead lamp. “You are in the hospital,” she says gently. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Nathan,” he manages to rasp out.
“Thank you, Nathan. Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”
“I was in my car – I think I was in a crash.”

The nurse offers a reassuring smile. “OK, that’s good. Yes, Nathan, you were in a pretty severe accident, but for the moment, it looks like you are not suffering any permanent brain injuries. We’ll need to conduct full scans, but you are a very lucky man!”

“Yeah,” he croaks, his voice thick with fatigue. “That’s me. Lucky.” He blinks rapidly, then adds weakly, “Do you think you could turn the lights down? I think my eyes are taking a while to adjust.”

By the time the doctor arrives, the haze of awakening has dissipated. Nathan’s vision has cleared, with the world back in focus, sharp and bright.

A few days later, a discharged Nathan is being wheeled out by Jodi’s brother, and one of his oldest friends, Hugh.

Hugh seems to be trying to be as light-hearted and positive as possible — which is a little unsettling since it is a deviation from his normal dry self. He was never a downer or anything like that, but this preppy attitude is obviously an act for Nathan’s benefit. Hugh probably suspects the crash wasn’t accidental, that something darker lurks beneath the surface.

“I’m glad you’re OK, brother,” Hugh says, forcing a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “But don’t forget — I lost my sister and nephew that day too.”

Nathan opens his mouth to protest, but the words catch in his throat.

“Just stop, man,” Hugh interrupts, his tone hardening. “We’re not playing who-has-it-worse. It doesn’t matter why you survived, it just matters that you DID survive and what you’re going to do with that.” His voice softens slightly. “You’re still here, so make the best of it.”

Realizing that until outside the hospital, Hugh has him as a captive audience, Nathan attempts to assuage his old friend. “You’re right, and you don’t have to worry about me. I’m going to be fine — it was just an accident. I’m just mad about the car – loved that damned thing!”

“Well why don’t you bring Jodi’s van into the shop? I’ll fix her up so at least you’ll have that.”

Now back home, Nathan’s old habits quickly return. Even with his doctor’s strict orders and his prescribed medication, the nightly embrace of whiskey is the only way to silence his tormented mind. The morning after a rough night, he decides it’s time to get off the couch and join the world again – even if it’s only for the twenty minutes to head down to the local coffee shop. Simply ordering his coffee will be the first in-person interaction he’s had in days, and he needs an excuse to shower and change.

It’s a beautiful day, sunny and bright. Still heavily hungover from the night before (but at least clean and shaved), Nathan navigates the crowded sidewalk with glazed eyes, clutching his coffee cup tightly. Rounding a corner, he hears the strumming of a street musician. A homeless man sits huddled against a lamppost, strumming an old acoustic guitar.

It’s not the music itself that draws Nathan in – it’s the faint glow emanating from the musician, pulsating with each chord. Convinced it’s a trick of the light or a side effect of his medication, he stops to listen, curiosity winning over his desire to continue home.

The music’s not bad, Nathan thinks to himself. A bit melancholic, perhaps, but Nathan is in a bit of a melancholic mood. But as the song progresses, Nathan notices something strange. The musician’s strumming is becoming increasingly frantic, each note tinged with desperation. Or is that just Nathan reading into it too much, putting himself into the music? The glow intensifies as the music picks up speed.

That’s when Nathan sees them. Two other men, their ragged, stained hoodies a stark contrast to their surprisingly clean sneakers, stride towards him with faces twisted in scowls. One of them carrying a glint of metal in his hand. The musician sees them and abruptly stops playing, looking frightened.

Nathan feels a chill crawl down his spine, but he can’t tear himself away. He watches, frozen in place, as the man with the knife lunges forward, plunging the blade into the musician’s back as he tries to run away. The glow around the musician flickers and dies, leaving the echo of that melancholic music crumpled on the pavement. The two men quickly run away, fleeing the scene of their deadly act.

Kneeling beside the musician, legs shaking, Nathan fumbles for his phone, his fingers trembling as he dials 911, knowing all too well that it was too late. The glow is gone. The music is gone. The musician, is gone.

Part Two

The obituary is three sentences long.

Nathan reads it four times anyway, sitting on the couch with his laptop balanced on one knee and a coffee going cold on the other. Marcus Ellery, 41. Local musician. Survived by a sister in Sudbury. No mention that a stranger knelt beside him on the sidewalk and watched the literal light go out of him.

A trick of the light, the responding officer had suggested, when Nathan tried, badly, to describe what he saw. Adrenaline does strange things. Sure. Adrenaline. Except Nathan saw the glow before the knife, before the two men in their ragged hoodies and suspiciously clean sneakers, before there was anything to be adrenalized about.

He’s been over it a hundred times since, and he keeps arriving at the same three possibilities, none of them good:

1. it’s God. Or an angel, or fate, or whatever you want to call the management. Some higher power flagging the doomed like a spellchecker underlining a word.

2. it’s a superpower. Which is insane. Forty-three-year-old men who drink themselves to sleep on their couches do not develop superpowers. That’s not how any of this works.

Or 3, and this is the one that keeps him up at night (or would if anything were letting him sleep), there is no glow. There never was. His fractured mind saw a frightened man in a bad situation and painted a light around him, the same way it paints muzzle flashes on the back of his eyelids. A coping mechanism for a broken man.

But here’s the thing about possibility three, the one his hypothetical therapist would circle in red ink: it doesn’t actually matter. If the glow is real, then people are dying and Nathan can see it coming. And if the glow is his own broken brain playing dress-up — well. He stood ten feet from Marcus Ellery and did nothing, the same way he stood next to Jodi and Jacob and did nothing. He’s not doing nothing again.

So Nathan starts walking.

He walks downtown every day for a week and a half. He tells Hugh he’s “getting his steps in,” which Hugh accepts with the desperate enthusiasm of a man who will take any sign of life he can get. He walks James Street and the market and the underpass by the rail yard, scanning faces like a man looking for someone he owes money to.

Nothing glows.

He starts to feel ridiculous. Then, on a grey Tuesday morning, at the intersection by the old bank building, a silver Buick glows.

Not the whole car, just the man inside it. Elderly, hat on, chin dipping toward his chest at a red light, wrapped in that same soft pulse of light Nathan last saw dying on a sidewalk. The traffic light turns green. The Buick doesn’t move. The chin dips lower.

The car begins to roll, slow, then building speed, drifting through the intersection at an angle that will introduce it to a concrete planter.

Nathan doesn’t decide to run. He’s simply already running, coffee abandoned to the pavement behind him, closing the distance and slapping his palm flat against the driver’s window — once, twice, hard — shouting something that isn’t quite words. The old man’s head snaps up. Wild eyes, a moment of pure animal confusion, and then the shriek of brakes as the Buick stops with its front bumper closer to disaster than anyone would like.

The glow peters out like a pilot light.

Gone. Not died-gone. Just… gone. Off. Nathan stands there in the road, hand still raised, heart performing a drum solo, and watches an ordinary old man in an ordinary car mouth thank you, thank you through the glass.

“Ha!” a laugh barks behind him, “That was genuinely the coolest thing I’ve seen all day.”

She’s maybe mid-thirties, with dark hair and laugh lines that have clearly seen regular use, holding a paper bag from the bakery on the corner like a witness holding evidence. She is, and Nathan registers this with a distant, guilty surprise, pretty.

“He fell asleep,” Nathan says. Smooth.

“Yeah, no, I got that part.” She’s grinning. “Most people would’ve just shouted. From the sidewalk. But you went full action hero.”

“I had a head start.” He does not explain what he means by this, because there is no version of I saw him glowing that ends with her still smiling at him.

She tells him her name. He immediately loses it in the noise of his own pulse and is too embarrassed to ask again. She says something about buying him a replacement coffee — she gestures at the now empty cup far behind him — and Nathan hears himself politely decline, some autopilot version of himself making excuses about being late for something. He isn’t late for anything. He hasn’t been late for anything in five months.

Walking home, he realizes two things. The first is that the glow doesn’t necessarily mean death. It means danger. The second is that for about ninety seconds back there, he hadn’t thought about Jodi or Jacob. He isn’t sure how to feel about that, so he decides, expertly, not to.

Three weeks pass, and Nathan is good at this.

That’s a strange sentence to think, but it’s true. He develops a route, a rhythm. The glow finds him maybe once, twice a week — a woman sheltering from the rain under a fire escape as the last rusted anchor lets go of the brick above her; a construction worker under a pallet with one strap too few; a man fishing off the pier, headphones in, working his way out along the wet ledge past the railing while the waves pick up. Each time, the same soft pulse of light. Each time, a shout, a grab, a slap on a window, and the glow winks out, satisfied, like a task ticked off a list.

Five saves. He counts them the way he used to count drinks: privately, and with more pride than he’d admit.

He still drinks. Let’s not get carried away. But the whiskey has become a nightcap instead of an anesthetic, and there are whole hours now where the muzzle flashes leave him alone. Hugh notices. Hugh, mercifully, says nothing, though his fake-preppy act has relaxed back into his usual dry self, which is how Nathan knows he’s passing inspection.

He’s leaving the market on a Thursday when he hears it. A loud, bark of a laugh, somewhere off to his left, and Nathan realizes with mild alarm that he knows exactly whose it is before he even turns around.

“Action hero!”

Same bakery bag, same laugh lines. Her name, she offers it again with the good grace to pretend it’s the first time, is Emma.

“I’m getting a drink,” Emma says, in the tone of someone reporting the weather. “The place on the corner has a pool table and exactly one dartboard. You’re coming, because I’ve been telling people about the sleeping-driver thing for three weeks and nobody believes me. You’re my evidence!”

Nathan opens his mouth to deploy the autopilot excuse.

“One drink!” Emma says. “You can tell me what you actually do when you’re not saving the elderly from their dreams.”

And because he cannot think of a single honest answer to that statement, he goes.

The bar is dim and warm and mostly empty, and Emma is easy to talk to, asks questions like she actually wants the answers, and she’s terrible at pool in a way that suggests she knows exactly how terrible she is and has made peace with it. Nathan wins two games and loses the third on purpose, which she immediately calls him on. For an hour, he is just a guy in a bar. He’d forgotten they made evenings like this.

He’s lining up a shot when the TV mounted above catches his eye.

…witnesses say the vehicle accelerated into the patio without braking. Three people are confirmed dead. The driver, 81-year-old Walter Krzyzek, is in custody, and police say it is not yet clear whether the incident was deliberate or medical…

The photo on the screen is a driver’s licence. Hat off, but Nathan would know that face anywhere. He watched it snap awake through a car window three weeks ago.

The cue makes a very small sound when he sets it down on the felt.

“Hey.” Emma’s beside him, following his stare to the screen. “You OK? You look like —”

“That’s him,” Nathan says. “That’s the guy. The Buick guy I saved.”

Emma looks at the TV, then back at him, and doesn’t say anything, because what is there to say? Coincidence. Obviously it’s a coincidence. The man fell asleep at the wheel once; clearly he shouldn’t have been driving; clearly this was always going to happen, with or without Nathan. It’s not like Nathan aimed him at that patio.

I saved him, Nathan thinks, watching the ambulances on the screen, and now three people are dead.

He tells himself he’s not going to look up the others.

He looks up the others.

It takes most of a night and most of a bottle. Of the five people he’s saved, he knows three names. Walter from the news, the construction worker Denny (he was a grateful sort), and the fire-escape woman. He never learned the names of the others.

Walter, he already knows about. Three dead on a restaurant patio.

Denny is easy to find, because Denny was arrested eleven days ago. Armed robbery. A convenience store out by the highway. The clerk didn’t survive.

The fire-escape woman takes longer, and when Nathan finally finds her, he almost wishes he hadn’t. She’s in the news too. Her name sits at the centre of an investigation into a “wellness group” north of the city, the kind articles describe with words like coercive and tragic and ongoing. The kind that ends with police tape around a farmhouse and families giving statements on courthouse steps. Nathan reads until he can’t anymore, then closes the laptop and sits very still in the dark.

Three for three. Every saved name he can check has taken life since.

Nathan does the math he’s been refusing to do. Five glows extinguished. And in their place: three dead on a patio, one dead behind a counter, and however many that farmhouse claims when the counting’s done. He set out to balance a ledger and somehow the ledger has gotten worse.

He picks up his phone. It’s 1:40 in the morning. He texts Emma anyway:

are you free tomorrow. i need to tell you something insane

The reply comes faster than it should at 1:40 a.m.:

intriguing AND alarming. noon. you’re buying.

He tells her all of it.

Not the sanitized version, all of it. Marcus Ellery and the light that died with him, the pulse around the Buick, five saves, three killers, the whole impossible arithmetic. They’re in the back corner of the same bar, drinks untouched, and Nathan talks for twenty straight minutes with his eyes on the table because he can’t watch her face do the thing where she decides he’s crazy.

When he finally looks up, her face isn’t doing that thing. Her face is doing a much worse thing: believing him.

“Okay,” Emma says slowly. “Okay. Working theory. The glow marks people who are about to die. You save them. And then they, what, they owe something? A life gets spared, so a life comes due, and it collects from someone standing nearby?”

“Some kind of balance,” Nathan says. “A trade.”

“Right, except —” Emma leans forward, and here it is, the flaw he’s been circling, delivered in the voice of a woman who is terrible at pool and apparently excellent at this — “except that’s not what’s happening, is it? If the universe just wanted its life back, Walter’s car could’ve hit a tree. Denny could’ve fallen off a cliff. The debt could come out of them.” She taps the table. “It doesn’t. Every single time, the person you saved is the one who does the taking. That’s not a balance, Nathan. That’s unjust.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know.” She sits back. “But it’s not bookkeeping. This is more like, you didn’t cancel their death. You converted it. Whatever was supposed to happen to them, it turned around and pointed outward.” She grimaces at her own sentence.

“And yet another question,” Nathan says quietly. “Was glow was on them before I ever showed up. So was it marking them to die?” He turns his glass in a slow circle. “Or was it marking them for me?”

Neither of them has an answer. The drinks go warm.

His phone buzzes against the table. Hugh.

van’s ready. come by the shop tomorrow. also i found something on the dashcam you need to see. don’t freak out. actually you’re definitely going to freak out

Hugh’s shop smells like oil and burnt coffee, and Jodi’s minivan sits in the middle bay looking better than it has in years, which is exactly the kind of thing Hugh does instead of grieving.

“So.” Hugh wipes his hands on a rag, not meeting Nathan’s eyes. “You know how I’ve been fixing up the van. Well, I’m not proud of this, but I was going through the old dashcam footage. Checking the camera still worked, and then it was her driving, and I just —” He stops. Starts again. “I’ve been watching them. The old clips. Her and Jacob doing the school run. It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” Nathan says, and means it, and files away the fact that he’s not the only one who’s been failing to sleep.

“Yeah, well. Just look at this.” Hugh has a laptop open on the workbench, a video paused. “This is from March. Two weeks before.” He doesn’t say before what. He doesn’t have to. “Watch the right side of the frame.”

He hits play.

Dashcam footage: Jodi’s view through the windshield, the rail crossing, Jacob’s voice off-camera saying something that makes her laugh. It’s the same crossing everyone rolls through. No gates, no lights, just a sign older than the van and a track that sees too many trains a week. The van eases forward, and Jodi doesn’t look left, she’s mid-laugh —

— and a man sprints into the frame from the right. Directly into the van’s path. Arms up, waving, planting himself in front of two tonnes of moving minivan like a lunatic, and Jodi slams the brakes, and the van jerks to a stop, and half a second later a freight engine slams through the frame with its horn wide open, close enough that the picture shudders and blows out white.

The van rocks. The man stands in the headlights, hands on his knees, chest heaving. Jodi’s voice on the recording, shaky: “Oh my God. Oh my God, are you okay?!”

“Guy just materialized,” Hugh says. “Watch. He waves off her thanks and basically runs away. Never seen anything like it. Not that it mattered. Two weeks later she’s —” His jaw works. “She never even mentioned it. Almost died and never said a word. I figured you’d want to see her, that’s mainly why I, Nathan?”

Nathan isn’t listening. Nathan is leaning into the screen, one finger on the trackpad, dragging the video back four seconds, pausing on the frame where the running man’s face crosses the headlights.

The shop goes very far away.

He knows that face. He has spent five months seeing that face every time he closes his eyes, lit by three muzzle flashes. He has memorized that face across a courtroom’s worth of news articles, hunted it through every photo the internet holds, hated it with a wattage he didn’t know he had.

The good samaritan. The lunatic in the headlights. The man who threw himself in front of Jodi’s van to save her life, two weeks before he walked into their house and took it.

Kyle. Fucking. Macedo.

Part Three

“Kyle,” Nathan hears himself say. “It’s Kyle Macedo.”

Hugh laughs. One syllable — the laugh of a man declining an offer. “Come on.”

“Hugh. Look at him.”

“I am looking at him, and it’s —” Hugh leans past Nathan toward the frozen frame, close enough that the screen lights his face, and Nathan gets to watch the exact moment it lands. Hugh straightens up very slowly, takes out his phone, and thumbs through to a photo. He holds it up next to the laptop.

The shop is silent except for the compressor ticking somewhere in the back.

“Okay,” Hugh says. “Okay. That’s him.” He sets the phone face-down on the workbench, like the photo might see them. “Nathan. Why is the man who killed my sister saving her life?”

They spend an hour on the question and get exactly one theory that holds air, and Hugh is the one who finds it. “He was fixated on her,” Hugh says, pacing the length of the bay. “That’s a thing. Stalkers do this. They insert themselves, they play hero, they build a whole relationship in their head, and when the real world doesn’t match it, they —” He stops at the wall, doesn’t turn around. “It’s a thing. I’ve read about it. It even explains why she never told anyone. Some stranger throws himself in front of your van, thanks him, drive away, forget it. She didn’t know she was the whole world to a man she’d met for eleven seconds.”

Hugh wants to take it to the police, and Nathan lets him win that argument, because it costs nothing. The case is closed. Kyle is dead. A detective with tired eyes will accept the footage, thank them sincerely, write the word fixation in a file, and close the drawer. Maybe that’s even the truth. It’s certainly a truth-shaped thing, the right size for the hole in everyone’s understanding.

But Nathan knows something Hugh doesn’t. He knows what it feels like to sprint at a stranger’s car with your heart doing a drum solo and no idea why your legs are already moving. He knows what Kyle Macedo was doing at that intersection, because he has spent three weeks doing it himself, up and down James Street, following a light nobody else can see. And that is the one thing he cannot say in this shop because there is no version of I see what Kyle saw that ends with Hugh still on his side.

Before Nathan leaves, Hugh ejects the SD card from the dashcam and holds it out. “Take it. It’s your van now, and… she’s on it. The school runs. All of it.” Then, catching something in Nathan’s face that he clearly doesn’t like: “Promise me something. Whatever is going on in your head right now, just give the police the footage. But you leave the rest alone. The widow, the house. Promise me.”

“I promise,” Nathan says. And at the time, he even means it.

At home, with the SD card in his laptop, Nathan watches the clip forty more times.

Frame by frame. Kyle Macedo sprinting into traffic. Kyle Macedo planting himself in front of two tonnes of momentum with his arms spread. Two weeks later, this same man walked through their side door with a gun nobody was ever able to trace and said I’m sorry like he meant it. Because, and this is the part Nathan keeps circling, the part that won’t hold still, he did mean it. Nathan was there. Nathan saw his face. Whatever that man was doing in their living room, he believed it was costing him something.

Hugh’s answer is that he was a creepy stalker, and Hugh’s answer explains everything except the one thing Nathan can’t unknow. Kyle wasn’t at that intersection for Jodi, he was there because of the glow.

There is exactly one person left who might know what Kyle was up to in his final weeks. It’s time to break a promise.

The drive across town takes nineteen minutes.

The house is small and yellow-bricked and aggressively ordinary, with a garden that was clearly loved once and has since been left to figure things out on its own. Nathan sits in the van at the curb for six full minutes, rehearsing an opening line, before walking up and knocking.

The woman who answers is younger than he expected. Her eyes do the whole journey in about a second and a half. Polite blankness, vague recognition, placement, horror — and the door is already closing.

“Please —”

“Go away.” Her voice through the shrinking gap is high and tight. “You can’t be here. Please just go away.”

“I’m not here for —” The door clicks shut, and Nathan finds himself talking to painted wood, which is somehow easier. “I’m not here for revenge. I’m not here to scream at you, or blame you, or dig anything up. I know you didn’t do this. I know it happened to you too.” He rests his forehead against the door frame, suddenly exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. “I need your help. Nobody on earth can help me except you. That’s the truth. Please. I need your help.”

After a short silence, the sound of a chain sliding, the door opens on Dana Macedo, arms wrapped around herself like a safety blanket.

“Ten minutes,” she says. “And I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

That makes two of us, Nathan doesn’t say.

The inside of the house is tidy in the compulsive way of someone who cleans instead of sleeping, a strategy Nathan recognizes well. She doesn’t offer him a drink. He doesn’t sit until she points at a chair, and then he sits like the chair might be booby-trapped.

What follows is the strangest conversation of Nathan’s life, which is a competitive category these days: two people, wrecked by the same three seconds, comparing notes from opposite sides of a gun.

Because Dana Macedo is not doing well either. She spends most nights, she tells him, staring at the ceiling and asking the same question Nathan asks — why — except her version has a hitch his doesn’t. Nathan lost his family to a monster. Dana lost her husband to one, but in a way that nobody sends casseroles for.

“Everyone wants me to say I saw signs,” she says, folded into the far corner of the couch. “The reporters. My sister. Everyone. Like if I admit he was secretly awful the whole time, the world makes sense again and we can move on.” Her jaw sets. “But I won’t say it, because it isn’t true. Kyle was kind. He was the guy who shovelled three driveways every snowfall and only owned one of them. He carried spiders outside. He struggled, he had depression, he was open about it, he had good stretches and bad ones, but he never, not once, in eleven years —” Her voice cracks and she rebuilds it. “He didn’t even own a gun, Mr. —”

“Nathan.”

“He didn’t own a gun! The police tore this house apart. No receipts, no paperwork, nothing. They never figured out where it came from. He hated the things.” She laughs, one broken note. “You want to hear the worst part? He was afraid of them. Said that guns don’t make us safer, just makes tragedy more likely.”

She’s quiet for a moment, before continuing: “Eleven years, and the only thing I never figured out about him was the escarpment. He wouldn’t go up. Not the trails, not the lookouts. I wanted an anniversary picture up at the overlook once and he waited for me at the bottom. I teased him about it for years. He was always afraid of heights.”

Nodding, Nathan asks the question he came to ask, the one about the weeks before. Was there anything? Anything at all?

Dana is quiet for a while.

“He stopped sleeping,” she says finally. “Around March. He’d be up all night in his study, he loved that little room, it was his spot, and I’d hear him in there at three, four in the morning. Not doing anything. Just… in there. And he got, I don’t know. Focused. Like he was working on something he couldn’t talk about.” She looks at her hands. “I thought it was the depression coming back. I asked if he was okay and he said — ” she stops, and Nathan watches her decide to say it — “he said, I’m just trying to get ahead of it. I didn’t ask what it was. I’ve had five months to wish I’d asked.”

“The study,” Nathan says, as gently as a person can say anything. “Is it —”

“I haven’t touched it.” She’s already standing, already walking, like she’s been waiting months for someone to make her open that door. “I can’t even vacuum the hallway outside it. Go ahead. Take whatever you want. I mean that — take it. The police already searched it.”

The study is the size of a walk-in closet with ambitions. A desk, a lamp, a filing cabinet, a window facing the neighbour’s fence. Five months of dust lying over everything like ash, one set of fingerprints in it on the doorknob — Dana’s, probably, from all the times she almost went in.

It takes Nathan ten seconds to find the notebook, because Kyle didn’t hide it. It’s sitting in the middle of the desk, squared to the edges, the way you leave something you intend to come back to. Or the way you leave something for whoever comes next.

It’s an ordinary spiral notepad. The first page is a list. Names on the left, dates on the right, in handwriting so neat it looks typed. Eleven entries. The dates all fall within the same six weeks.

Nathan reads the list twice before his brain permits him to understand what he’s looking at, and it’s the ninth name that does it. The ninth name, dated March 19th, in Kyle Macedo’s careful hand:

Jodi Reyes-Whitlock.
The tracks on Victoria. Train. March 19th.

Nathan sits down in a dead man’s chair, in a dead man’s study, holding a list of eleven people a dead man saved, and understands that he is reading Kyle’s version of the count Nathan keeps in his own head. Five saves, Nathan had thought, Looks like Kyle got to eleven.

The rest of the notepad is blank. Nathan turns every page anyway, dust ghosting off the paper, and finds only one other thing in the entire book. The last page, inside back corner, in writing so small he has to hold it under the lamp. Not neat anymore. Pressed so hard into the paper it’s nearly engraved:

who brings the glow light?

Glow, crossed out. Corrected like it was important.

Nathan takes the notebook. In the hallway, Dana doesn’t ask what he found, and he understands the arrangement perfectly: she let him in so that whatever was in that room would leave with him. At the door she says, “Did it help?” and Nathan says, “Yes,” and it is the single largest lie he has ever told anyone.

At Emma’s apartment, that night. The notebook on her kitchen table between them like a bomb that might go off.

They work the list. Eleven names into search bars, one by one. Most return nothing, ordinary people leading unindexed lives. But the third name matches a woman quoted in an April news brief about a gas leak on her street, evacuated with minutes to spare when “a passerby banged on every door on the block.” The sixth matches a man mentioned in a fire department press release. Saved, both of them. And the seventh name matches a court docket from June, and Nathan closes that tab before Emma can read it, but not before he sees the charge.

Emma sits back from the table. “Nathan. If he saved Jodi, why would he come back?”

“Because he knew what she was going to become.”

The words just sit there.

“He had eleven data points,” Nathan says. “I have five. He watched it happen, over and over, same as me. And Jodi and Jacob were on his list.” His voice is doing something strange and he lets it. “He wasn’t hunting her, Emma. He was undoing her. Undoing his own save before the bill came due. That’s why I’m sorry. That’s why Jacob —” and there Nathan stops, because there is no version of that sentence he can survive finishing.

“Then when did it start? For him.”

Nathan pulls the laptop over. Because there’s one search they haven’t yet run. He types the name and starts scrolling past everything from this year, and last year, back and back, looking for anything from before.

“What are you doing?” Emma asks.

“Getting ahead of it,” Nathan says.

He finds it at 1:12 in the morning, on the fourth page of results, in a digitized archive of a local paper that stopped printing before Jacob was born. A scanned page from deep inside a February issue, fifteen years old. Single column, no photograph. The kind of story a paper runs because it happened, not because anyone wanted to read it.

OVERNIGHT RESCUE ON ESCARPMENT; MAN, 22, UNHARMED

The article is four sentences long. An emergency call shortly after three in the morning. Rope crews from the fire department, an operation lasting nearly two hours, a man brought back from the edge and assessed by paramedics at the scene. His name, in the third sentence: Kyle Macedo, 22. Police did not say what brought the man to the trail at that hour.

But Nathan knows. He knows what could bring a man to the edge of the escarpment, alone. Five months ago the same thing brought him to the roads. He’d just made the trip on wheels. And he knows what Kyle took with him that night: a world with its lights turned up too bright, and, soon enough, a glow.

Emma reads it over his shoulder and goes very still.

“That’s the escarpment,” she says. “Nathan, that’s where you —”

“Yeah.”

“Nathan, there are two ways to read this, and I need you to hear both of them before you pick one, because you’re going to pick one tonight and it’ll become impossible to convince you otherwise once you decide.”

He waits.

“Either this is real or it isn’t. If it’s real, then it’s no good and you need to ignore it for the rest of your life.

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then there never was any light. You’re a broken man who lost too much. This was your way to try and make things better, to make up for what’s been taken from you.”

The laptop hums.

“Which one do you believe?” Nathan asks her.

“I asked you first,” Emma says. God he wishes he could just hear her loud laugh again instead.

Two weeks later, Nathan is doing better, according to everyone qualified to have an opinion.

He’s back hanging at Hugh’s shop on Saturdays, handing the man wrenches and taking the abuse that passes between them for love. He sees Emma on Thursdays, and sometimes also on days that are not Thursday, and neither of them has raised the subject of the notebook, which lives in a drawer in his kitchen underneath the takeout menus, exactly as radioactive as the day he took it.

He hasn’t looked for the glow in fourteen days. He counts them the way he used to count drinks.

Tonight he’s at the kitchen table with a coffee and a fresh notepad, because his hypothetical therapist became an actual therapist last week, and she suggested writing things down. Get it out of your head and onto paper, she said. Paper can hold it so you don’t have to.

So Nathan writes. It’s supposed to be feelings, but a list comes out instead.

The pier man — past the breakwall, June 30. The loading dock man — R. something? — July 9.

Nathan looks at the two names for a long moment. Then he flips past them, past all the blank pages, to the inside back corner, and sits with his pen hovering over the paper, and discovers that he already knows what he wants to write there. Has maybe always known. The pen touches down —

His phone lights up on the table. A message from Emma.

pool. 20 min. you’re losing on purpose again and I’m collecting.

Nathan looks at the message for a while. At the small, patient glow of it.

Texting back on my way, he pockets the phone and his keys, leaving the notepad on the table. Leaving the kitchen, Nathan turns off the light.