Free The Secret of Everything by Barbara O'Neal

will.”
    Tessa clipped the phone closed and buttered her bread, wondering why the conversation had left her feeling so uneasy.

FIVE

       W hen she was released from prison, Annie Veracruz had rented an efficiency apartment above the drugstore, right on the plaza. It was small and, to be honest, slightly grimy. The couch was brown with itchy specks in it, and there was a recliner that listed to the left and would only actually recline if you reached down and pulled on the foot part. An old-school television that had a good strong picture and a box to bring in basic cable was shoved against the wall. The kitchen was just a fridge, a sink, a skinny battered old stove, and six inches of counter, but there was a big window that looked over the mountains and a red table with red vinyl chairs.
    She loved that table. Yesterday, she’d gone out specifically to collect yellow flowers to put in a water glass with blue and yellow stripes. Now, as she walked into the room to get ready for work, there they were, glowing, mostly sunflowers but a few other wildflowers she didn’t know how to name. It was beautiful. The whole time she was making her breakfast—pouring Cheerios into a bowl and slicing a banana into it, and smelling the tea in the air—she was sliding glances toward that glassful of yellow against the red table and plain wall. Sunshine startedto edge into the room from the east, and in a few minutes it would all blaze. Annie was ready.
    And when it happened, she was sitting at her table with a bowl of her favorite cereal, Honey Nut Cheerios—not just the plain ones, which sometimes they did give you in jail, and the perfect arrangement of bananas, just like on the box, and a cup of milky tea. Then the music of the light moved right over the petals of the flowers, setting them afire, and Annie took a bite of cereal, her own heart blazing with joy.
    Free. She was free. There was a thick bracelet around her ankle that she’d have to wear for a year, but the jail time was done, and, even better, her time with Tommy was done.
    Free. And she didn’t intend to waste a single second of it. She celebrated with yellow flowers and Cheerios and tea made just as she liked it.
    Free.
    Church bells rang exuberantly, welcoming the faithful to Mass. They clanged Tessa awake on Sunday morning. Turning over, she tossed the wilted covers off her body—and slammed right into the black hole that had been living in the middle of her chest for three months.
    She did not believe in wallowing and lacked patience for navel-gazing dramas. And yet here she was, stuck in this airless-ness, struggling to breathe while the black hole sucked her down.
    It was a dark place, created equally from genuine sorrow, searing regret, and bitter self-recrimination. Because Tessa had not done her job, a woman was dead. How, exactly, did you ever make that right?
    She was as good as a man at compartmentalizing her life—putting everything into its own box and dealing with only what was right in front of her. To some degree, that still worked with the disaster in Montana. Aside from panic attacks, the odd nightmare, and these unguarded moments when it all showed up to crush her.
    I’m fine
, she thought, turning over.
Why do you ask? Ha-ha
.
    A psychologist in the hospital had told her that if she didn’t deal with all the emotion attached to the doomed trip, she could expect to continue to be ambushed by panic attacks.
    Mostly, she could avoid thinking about it. Mostly, she simply pushed it away. But then she would notice the still-shiny scar tissue on her foot, and suddenly she’d be back on the morning of that last day in Montana. She had thought, clearly, that she should not go out, that the spider bite was too infected.
    But she powered through, because that’s what she did—she was strong, she was the leader. When the mountain came down in an avalanche of mud, dumping Lisa and her into the river, Tessa was so addled from the infection that she’d