738 Days: A Novel by Stacey Kade Page B

window reveals a heart that someone has clumsily drawn on the glass on a previous outing in this car. “Do you remember the episode with the bus after Skye’s track meet?”
    It takes me a second to make the leap. She’s talking about Starlight . First season sometime, I think. “All the episodes tend to blend together after a while,” I admit.
    “The bus crashes on the way back from the track meet, and Brody saves Skye, as he always does,” Amanda says.
    Now I remember. We shot on a bus set that week, the vehicle cut in half for easier filming, and on location on an abandoned stretch of road in the middle of nowhere. My biggest memory of that episode is freezing and trying not to let it show. Calista as Skye had it much worse in track shorts and a T-shirt.
    “But then they learn that if he changes things in the crash to save Skye, these other three kids will die,” Amanda continues. “According to Brody, Skye needs to live to stop the apocalypse, and those other kids … they don’t have a role in saving the world. Skye and Brody try everything to find a work-around, but there isn’t one. She begs him to save the other kids and let her die because she doesn’t believe her life is worth more than theirs. She doesn’t believe Brody when he says she is important.”
    It was the mid-season finale, bringing even more doubt to Brody and Skye’s future together. If he does what she wants, the world is doomed and he loses his chance at redemption. But he knows she’ll never forgive him if he doesn’t.
    “Brody ignores her and does it anyway, of course,” she says with a laugh, but her voice sounds soft, vulnerable. “He saves her. Because he believes she matters. Not just to the world but to him.” She shifts in her seat. “I guess … everybody wants to be the one worth saving,” she says with a wry twist of her mouth. “When you were there, talking to me, telling me I needed to keep fighting, I felt like it mattered, like I mattered. And I wasn’t alone.”
    My throat is tight with emotion. “Amanda—”
    My cell phone rings then, loud and shrilly, disrupting the quiet and making me jump, even though the meditation-chime setting is supposed to be soothing.
    “Shit. Sorry.” I fumble for it in my pocket to shut off the noise, but the screen is flashing Elise’s picture, one she took from my bed one night and set for her contact on my phone. It’s obvious what was going on immediately before the picture, from her rumpled hair to the bedsheet wrapped under her arms.
    Amanda would have to be blind not to see it, and she most definitely is not blind.
    I swipe the answer button. “I can’t talk right now,” I say curtly. “I’m driving back to the hotel.” Then for good measure, I add, “And I fired you, remember?”
    “Oh.” It’s more of an exhalation than a word from Elise, but that’s it, enough to assure me she gets it, then a click as she hangs up. Shortest conversation I’ve ever had with her, but then again, Elise is nothing short of dedicated when it comes to one of her schemes.
    I set the phone to silent and dump it in the cup holder by the gearshift. “Sorry about that.”
    “You don’t need to apologize,” Amanda says. But I can feel that something has shifted here in the darkness, creating a distance that wasn’t present a few seconds ago. “That was your publicist? The one who took your car?”
    I have the feeling she’s asking more than that, but that ground is far too dangerous to tread at the moment. “Yeah, that’s her.”
    “Ah. Okay.”
    “So I think it’s your turn for a question,” I prompt, trying to steer the conversation back on track. It feels, oddly, like we lost something in that interruption. We’re back to being strangers in the dark.
    Amanda shakes her head. “No, it’s not important. We should talk about the plan.”
    “The plan?”
    “How we’re going to get them to take pictures,” she says pointedly.
    “Right, yes. Okay.” I have to