What if we had taken another road?
What if we had reached that intersection ten seconds later?
Maybe Mark would still be alive.
That was why I began avoiding Susan after the funeral.
I thought that every time she looked at me, she would see the man who had walked away alive from the car in which her son had died.
Susan looked at me.
“And now I’m going to tell you the thing I never told you.”
She asked Lisa to take her phone from her purse.
Lisa hesitated but did as she was asked.
Susan said,
“There’s a recording on it. Under Mark’s name.”
I froze.
“What recording?”
“One of his last voice messages.”
Susan had kept it for five years.
Lisa pressed play.
At first, all I heard was Mark laughing.
I recognized it immediately.
Then came his voice.
He had sent the message to his mother that same evening, shortly before leaving the birthday party.
