high up on the far wall, allows in the flickering red and gold light from the flames consuming her home and making the garage look ghoulish with large undulating shadows. She could never reach that window with all of the boxes and lawn equipment stacked in front of it. It will not serve as an escape route. The hairs stand on her neck and icy fingers run down her spine as she senses him walking toward the garage now. She knows he is coming. The garage feels like Hobbs’ shed; it even smells like the shed with the scent of gasoline, paint, and rusting metal from the gardening tools. She imagines Kent and sees him nailed to the side of the garage wall. No, she reprimands, no, think straight. Then, Gravel is there in the doorway. No, not here. You are not real. Stop, she pleads with herself. Focus. It is Ben. Ben is real. Ben is here! This is happening, right now, isn’t it? Or have I gone mad? Have I set the house on fire? Have I gone mad and set my home on fire? No. She jumps over the lawn mower and ducks under the three bicycles suspended from the ceiling by ropes. The skin on her bare burned feet stings as she shuffles around the snowboarding boots. She begins to breathe through her mouth to keep up with her pounding heart and to expel some of the inhaled smoke that tastes dirty on her tongue. She burrows in toward the back wall of the room behind the old broken-down Ford, which hasn’t moved in two years. She shrinks down into the corner with the Mossberg sleek and heavy in her hands. And this is when it all becomes clear. This is the exact instant when she finally realizes that it is not about her life. It is an epiphany: this has never been about her life. It was a fluke that she survived. It was not meant to be. Everyone knows that, and that is the reason why people look at her strangely, and why they do not understand her. It created an imbalance. It was one enormous cosmic mistake. Yes. And that is what has prolonged this nightmare, and that is why she has been in a half-alive condition all of this time; because she was self-concerned, because she was not focusing on what was really her task, her function, her responsibility. It was her destiny to trade herself for Jimmy and Hank. It was supposed to be her life for their lives. She has thwarted fate and so she has been stuck in this altered state of delusion and hallucination, suspended in a half-living, half-dead form all this time because she was unwilling to commit her own self, unwilling to make the needed sacrifice. She looks back over the course of the last month and realizes she was not meant to survive the island. If she would have stood out in the open at that one moment in front of the lodge, and if she would have taken the clear shot at Ben that was offered to her in that moment, then that would have ended this when it was meant to end and how it was supposed to end with both of them dead. That is why this is not over, that is why this has all felt unfinished, and that is why she and Ben are tied to each other in this cyclical death dance. She wanted more than she was meant for; she wanted it all, to save herself and her family. She wanted too much. She should have been grateful to step out from behind that rock and take out Benjamin Burne no matter how many bullets he sank into her chest while doing it. That is what Hank would have done. That was what was required. She has not really been alive since she left the island that night and this is how she knows that what she is thinking is the truth. She has not lived one single day in a whole state. He is coming, yes, he is supposed to come, and it is time. It is past time. Instantly, she feels lighter. She has all the time in the world and calmly she waits for Ben to step into the garage. Now, she understands what is meant by destiny, by fate, what is truly meant when someone says, “It is written.” It has been incomplete because