Ihad another sleepless night, and as much as I want to go back to bed, I realize I can’t. Not until I tell you how it happened.

The accident didn’t happen the way you probably imagine, or the way that Miles imagined. I hadn’t, as he suspected, been drinking that night. Nor was I under the influence of any drugs. I was completely sober.

What happened with Missy that night was, quite simply, an accident.  I’ve gone over it a thousand times in my mind. In the fifteen years since it happened, I’ve felt a sense of déjà vu at odd times—when carrying boxes to a moving van a couple of years ago, for instance—and the feeling still makes me stop whatever it is I’m doing, if only for a moment, and I find myself drawn back in time, to the day that Missy Ryan died.

I’d been working since early that morning, unloading boxes onto pallets for storage in a local warehouse, and I was supposed to be off at six. But a late shipment of plastic pipes came in right before closing time—my employer that day was the supplier for most of the shops in the Carolinas—and the owner asked if I wouldn’t mind staying for an extra hour or so. I didn’t mind; it meant overtime, time and a half, a great way to pick up some much needed extra cash. What I hadn’t counted on was how full the trailer was, or that I’d pretty much end up doing most of the job alone.

There were supposed to be four guys working, but one had called in sick that day, another couldn’t stay since his son was playing a baseball game and he didn’t want to miss it. That left two of us to do the job, which still would have been okay. But a few minutes after the trailer pulled in, the other guy turned his ankle, and the next thing I knew, I was all by myself.  It was hot, too. The temperature outside was in the nineties, and inside the warehouse it was even hotter, over a hundred degrees and humid. I’d already put in eight hours, with another three hours to go. Trucks had been pulling up all day, and because I didn’t work there regularly, most of my work was the backbreaking type. The other three guys rotated turns using the forklift, so they might get a break now and then. Not me. My job was to sort the boxes and then haul them from the back of the trailer to where the door slid up, loading everything on pallets so the forklift could move them into the warehouse. But by the end of the day, since I was the only one there, I had to do it all. By the time I finished up, I was bone-tired. I could barely move my arms, I had spasms in my back, and since I’d missed dinner, I was starving, too.  That’s why I decided to go to Rhett’s Barbecue instead of heading straight home.  After a long, hard day, there’s nothing better in the world than barbecue, and when I finally crawled into my car, I was thinking to myself that in just a few minutes, I’d finally be able to relax.

My car back then was a real beater, dented and banged up all over, a Pontiac Bonneville that had a dozen years on the road already. I’d got it used the summer before and paid only three hundred dollars for it. But even though it looked like hell, it ran good and I’d never had a problem with it. The engine started up whenever I turned the key, and I’d fixed the brakes myself when I first bought it, which was all it really needed at the time.  So I got in my car just as the sun was finally going down. At that time of night, the sun does funny things as it arcs downward in the west. The sky is changing color almost by the minute, shadows are spreading across the roads like long, ghostly fingers, ............