“Maybe there was a little blip of a heartbeat.”“

Luna’s voice trembled in the room.

Evelyn couldn’t tell what was louder, her breathing or the pounding she felt in her ears. Kyle was lying on the floor between them, arm twisted under him, a lamp he’d knocked over casting a long shadow over the twisted angle of his body.

None of this was in the plan.

The plan was ice cream, deleting all the photos, and blocking his number to be extra dramatic.

Not this.

“I didn’t push him that hard,” Luna whispered, walking away slowly almost like the floor would swallow her up with one wrong step. “He kept yelling. Like it wasn’t a big deal. Like you were the crazy one.”

Evelyn stared at Kyle’s face. Her mind rewinding through her memories or how he smiled, when he would say he loved her, when he promised her she was the only one.

There had been someone else. Three actually!

She had seen the messages.

“Evelyn say something,” Luna asks. “Is he. . ?”

Evelyn dropped to her knees beside him, her hands shaking as she put them over his chest. She didn’t know what she was checking for: a pulse, a sign?

“He was laughing,” Luna said. “You were crying, and he was laughing. I just wanted him to stop.”

Then a faint sound.

Not from Kyle.

From his wrist.

Both girls froze.

His smartwatch screen flickered to life in the dimmed room.

“Heart rate detected”

A tiny graph line jumped.

Luna gasped. “That’s the blip. That means…”

Evelyn leaned closer, hope and dread colliding in her chest.

The line bounced again.

Not flat.

Not gone.

“Okay, we call an ambulance. Right now. We tell them he fell, that’s it.” Evelyn breathed, clarity cutting through the panic.

Luna nodded fast, tears streaking down her face. “I didn’t want him dead, I just wanted him to feel bad for one second.”

Evelyn looked at Kyle, her thoughts raced.

Her voice was steadier than she felt. “Whatever he did to me, we aren’t anything like him!”

In the distance the sirens wail, growing louder.

On Kyle’s wrist, the small line kept moving, one quiet, blip at a time.

Sirens hadn’t reached the house yet when Evelyn grabbed her keys.

“We can’t be here,” she said. Her voice was steady in a way that scared Luna more than her crying.

Luna looked once more at Kyle on the floor, the glow of his wrist still shining.

Blip.

They left the lamp where it lay. The door half open. The room still holding the shape of what had happened.

Outside the air was cold. They got in the car,

Neither of them spoke as Luna started the engine. The house shrank in the rearview mirror, streetlights blurred. Evelyn pressed her hands together so hard her knuckles turned white.

Luna glances over “I didn’t want…” she started.

“I know,” Evelyn said.

As Luna turns to keep driving the ambulance tore through the crossing, lights spinning, sirens screaming, carrying Kyle, alive, strapped to a stretcher inside.

Then the metals collided.

The sound was enormous, violent, and final.

The car spun while the glass burst. The world flipped with impact.

The ambulance tipped, skidding sideways. Sparks started across the pavement, something igniting.

Fire blossomed fast, bright, and unforgiving.

The sirens didn’t stop, they just changed.

Inside the burning ambulance and crushed car, no one survived.

The flames swallowed everything, leaving only smoke and silence behind.