Of course it was pouring. Of course! Everything Danielle tried to do lately went to hell; her decision to drive home was beginning to look like the wrong one. Flying would've been so difficult with the baby, though. The thought of attempting to calm a screaming infant, of breastfeeding in such close quarters with a bunch of judging strangers was enough to banish the little sleep she was getting. The only benefit of a flight would've been its duration . . . well, and also the fact that she wouldn't have had to pay attention to anything, not the way one needed to while driving a car.

Because really, she was exhausted, and her mental state hadn't felt so stable, lately, and now, night driving in the rain on the highway, she was starting to wonder whether she'd be able to make it to her hotel before she lost it.

A glance in the rearview mirror satisfied her that the infant car seat was still in back, strapped into the middle and facing backward, as was apparently the safest. She hated not being able to see her baby, but it was the way of things. She'd reach back and jiggle the seat every so often, until she got a gurgle or an audible breath from Evangeline, just to reassure herself that the creature hadn't suddenly choked or asphyxiated or something. There were far too many ways for an infant to die; the paranoia of being a new mother was something Danielle hadn't been prepared for. Add to that her old friends' resurfacing paranoia, and the woman was barely managing to keep it together.

She hadn't indicated as much to Helen or Joanna, though. Those two were as aggravatingly insecure as they'd always been, and at least one of them had to remain strong in the face of Anjulie's bullshit. Danielle knew she was the only one who could stand up to Anjulie, and so here she was, making the nearly eighteen-hour drive home.

Admittedly, there was more to it than that. After all these years, there was no way Danielle would drop everything and rush back to her horrible Midwest youth merely to tell Anjulie off. She hadn't spoken to Anjulie since they'd parted ways at their eighth grade graduation, when she'd said something to the effect of "Enjoy public school. Hope you don't get shot" as a sort of middle finger to her former friend. The rest of them had, after all, been headed to private Catholic schools. After that, she'd heard things about Anjulie, even run into her around town occasionally as they'd moved their ways through high school, but she'd never again spoken to her. It'd seemed fitting that the worst of them would end up pregnant before she'd even managed to obtain her GED. She'd had a daughter, Danielle had heard, but she'd never seen the girl. Anjulie was nearly non-existent on social media, besides images of her on the site for that weird business she ran. God, Anjulie's daughter would have to be something close to twenty, now! And here was Danielle with a literal infant in the back of her car. It was difficult to discern which of them was better off in the mom department. That was the real reason she was headed back to town. Not to ask Anjulie for mothering advice, but because . . . because she was just as disturbed as Helen and Joanna were at the possibility that the thing they'd woken years ago was manifesting through her child.

In fact, as much as Danielle didn't want to deal with the past, to exhume it from the grave in which she'd interred it, the notion that the thing had something to do with her instability was actually a bizarre relief. What she'd been experiencing, the children and how they looked at her baby, her nightmarish sleepwalking . . . she'd begun to grow terrified that she was losing her mind. So to find out it might be that unwelcome yet familiar entity might at least mean she was still, to some degree, sane.

Or as sane as it was possible to be around that thing.

She inadvertently shuddered as she thought back. Danielle still controlled enough of her brain to keep the worst points at bay, but what always haunted her, what she could never seem to escape, was the way Emily had looked that night: the perfect smooth skin of her cheeks, pale and soft; the faint blush about her subtly glistening babydoll lips, parted just barely to show her adorable rabbit teeth; her straight golden hair, almost white in the surreal fairytale light, tangling in the blonde fringes of eyelash as it fell across her sleeping glass eyes; and the cave-lizard appearance of the rest of her, as if her delicate flesh had never known sunlight, as if her bones were nothing more than straws in an empty puppet, as if she were a wax doll, and they were her makers.

That image of Emily, it haunted Danielle. It claimed her darkest nightmares while also flitting through her most intimate daydreams. Before the baby, when her body had been something she'd wanted to look at, wanted to touch, she'd held that vision of her long-dead friend in her thoughts whenever release seemed otherwise impossible. She had shared her most private moments with that haunting apparition, though she hardly knew quite why. Perhaps she'd loved Emily. Or perhaps she'd relished the cruelty of their treatment. Maybe it'd been some combination of the two, some pleasure from her ability to, in a way, inflict pain on someone—to control someone she . . . she what? Danielle didn't know, anymore. She wasn't sure she'd ever really known. She'd thought it was hate that had compelled her that night, but the emotions connected to her memories crossed into themselves, wound round and through one another into strange tapestries. Danielle knew as little now as she had then about why she'd done what she'd done.

Emily had been her friend first, hers more than anyone else's, her best friend, but that girl had always treated everyone else the same, shown identical affection to each and every person in their cramped, all-consuming childhood world, and Danielle had just never understood why. The little bitch should've cared most about the friend she'd known since they were still in diapers, the one who'd practically been her other sister! And yet instead, by the time it had all happened, a gap had begun to dilate between them. There'd been no clear source of it, no words spoken to acknowledge it, but they'd both sensed it, every time a spidery moment sent tremors across the web.

Danielle wiped the fingers of one hand across her hard cheekbones. When had she begun to cry? It was the frustration of everything, of the baby and these old memories and the idea that the thing had come back and the thought of seeing people she'd tried to cut out of her life. All of it was too much.

When would she reach the hotel? This drive had taken so much more time than she'd intended. The rain and all the stops to breastfeed and diaper change hadn't helped. She did everything methodically, now, nothing particularly loving in her motherly obligations, but she was too isolated to know her lack of attachment was worrisome. Evangeline needed to be cared for, so Danielle cared for her. That was all she knew at present. But she was tired. Absolutely enervated. The storms had sharpened and then dulled her attention, and it wasn't as if she'd had proper sleep lately, anyway. At least traffic had let up considerably. The clock glowed in its neon blue 8:17, mocking her weariness; the window wipers continued to swipe left and right, their rubbery squealing indicating the rain had let up. Danielle couldn't be bothered to turn them down. Lights from the oncoming cars glimmered, expanded, blew past, and distant red tail-lights hovered like the eyes of evil creatures in the misty black blanket before her.

Oh, to sleep! To fall onto a yielding mattress, a pile of blankets and pillows, and just close her eyes. To blackout uninterrupted for as long as she liked. Fuzzy warmth tingled through Danielle's arms, her core. Everything felt so heavy around her, so seductive. The corners of her vision dimmed; the lane lines wavered; the damp pavement reflected too much for comfort. Two white circles of light, far, far away, drew near, nearer, nearer . . . merged into one bright ball and rather than zoom past at her left was suddenly right there, before her, spinning and pulsing within her own car and—

A massive jolt, horrifying screeching as metal scraped concrete at high speed. Sparks showered around the vehicle, and for what seemed minutes but was mere seconds, Danielle was sure some end had come upon her and was ready to accept it. But then the noise stopped, and the lights were gone, and everything stilled.

She perceived her own faltering breaths first. They reminded her she was alive and awake, revealed the reality of what'd happened. Thank God she'd been driving in the fast lane, that there were few cars on the highway. She'd left her lane and gone up against the median, sideswiped it for a quarter mile or so, but either she or the force of the impact had slowed the car, and somehow, she hadn't lost control. Still, the entire left side of the vehicle was likely a mess. Clutching her chest, her thighs, her head, Danielle found herself unharmed. But—the baby! Evangeline!

She turned and shook the carseat. Nothing happened, no sound or sign of movement. Nauseated from nerves, Danielle had enough wherewithal to engage the hazards before crawling into the passenger seat and exiting her car into the vaporous clouds of dark rain. Careful to watch for lights, she quickly moved to the rear and paused, fingers beneath the door handle, when she caught sight of the carseat. From outside the car it looked . . .

But no. It couldn't be. The water, her eyes, her shock—tricks. Some sort of mirage,

Yanking open the door, Danielle threw herself into the back and found, to her disbelief, that the infant seat was indeed, as it had appeared, empty.

Her hands shook almost uncontrollably as she touched the buckle, the cushion, the back of the chair, crawled beneath the cumbersome plastic seat and searched the floor. She spent several moments scrambling about the interior, knowing the baby wasn't there but uncertain what else to do, before leaving the car to check the trunk and area under and surrounding the sedan, even where it now crunched up against the concrete. Her efforts were all in vain. Panic turned quickly to hysteria. None of it made sense. The baby—she'd been right there! She'd been in that seat, and now she—she wasn't? It was impossible! Had she left her at home? No, no. There'd been so many stops along the way! Oh, the last gas station or rest area . . . had someone taken her? Had she left her own baby behind? Had she fallen out? As inconceivable as that was, Danielle stumbled alongside the median, retraced the car's path. The vehicles that sped past honked, shifted lanes, but she was heedless of them. She'd had one job . . . only one! And though she hadn't loved it, hadn't embraced it as she'd believed she would, she'd tried. She'd tried because she'd wanted—no, needed someone to need her, to rely on her. Someone to recognize and appreciate the effort she'd put into living, to assure her that she was living, after all, because so much of life felt like walking through a void. Without the future she'd envisioned with the daughter she'd figure out how to love, Danielle was unsure her existence, when it was all done, would have mattered at all, to anyone, ever.

Only a few more miles to the hotel, she thought as she stumbled through the rain, which had begun to pelt again. I could walk it. I could make it. But . . . not without . . . without . . .

"My daughter!"

There, on the slick pavement, barely visible in the light of her own flashing hazards and the headlights of oncoming semis, was the baby, unmoving, its little arms and legs splayed, and when Danielle fell down next to it, she saw that its face—as in the worst of the night and day terrors she'd experienced—was nothing but a hole, gaping back into the soft meat of the infant's head.

Too frightened to touch the thing but too ashamed to leave it, the woman pulled her body up rigid against the median, descended into a delirious mixture of sobs and groans and screams.

When police and paramedics arrived on scene within a matter of fifteen minutes, they found Danielle hysterical over a mottled piece of her front bumper and figured it was trauma from the collision that'd caused her to leave her infant behind in the car, strapped firmly into its seat, where it was sleeping soundly.