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an iPod, oblivious?
    “Wait!” Eve shouted after her. “I’m sorry! I just want to make sure you’re okay!”
    But the woman kept on, fading into darkness.
    Eve leaned heavily, hands on thighs, panting, her gorge rearing. She thought she might throw up from the adrenaline. A muted squawk broke the nighttime stillness.
    “Ma’am? Ma’am?”
    The phone. On the passenger seat.
    “Ma’am? Mrs. Hardaway? Are you all right?”
    Eve crawled across, lifted the phone in a trembling hand, pressed it to her hot cheek.
    The silky-smooth voice, now in her ear. “Are you there?”
    Eve’s breaths came in shallow puffs. A bitter taste suffused the back of her mouth. She couldn’t find her voice. Bridging the console, one hand shoved into the bisque cloth of the passenger seat to support her weight, she stared disbelievingly through the windshield at the spot of inky blackness into which she had just vanished on a better model of her bike.
    “Mrs. Hardaway? Are you still there?”
    She thought of herself up ahead somewhere in the night, spared. She thought of the cheery yellow sleeves of the airline tickets, the miles she’d planned to reclaim for another trip someday if she ever found the time. She thought of Oaxaca, the safest state in Mexico, wild and new and set like a jewel against the Pacific, a cosmic distance from the hamster-wheel cage she’d created for herself.
    She slid back behind the wheel of the stalled-out Prius, angled toward the curb, going nowhere.
    “I don’t know,” she said.

FRIDAY

 
    Chapter 3
    Through dust-dappled windows, Eve marveled at the endless walls of green on either side of the winding dirt road. She and five fellow tourists sat crammed in the back of the Chevy Express passenger van. It carved through the foliage, rising toward the azure sky at an alarming rate. In fact, this stretch of the Sierra Madre del Sur range represented the quickest altitude climb in all of Mexico. It ran at a north-south tilt, throwing winds into unpredictable swirls that crushed humidity from the Pacific down unevenly onto folds and barrancas, ridges and canyons. She’d picked this up over the past week, latent geek that she was, from various travel and nature books.
    Their destination, the indulgently named Días Felices Ecolodge™, was nestled in the transition zone bridging the gap between low-growth jungle, which ended at five hundred meters, and the cloud forest, which began at eight. Never was the jungle more vibrant and chaotic than now in August, smack in the middle of the wet season. This made Eve uncomfortable and excited her darkly. Bugs and slugs and rains! Oh, my! The whole trip, after all, was a statement to herself. It was about taking risks, pushing beyond her comfort zone.
    The van crossed the Río Zimatán and forged east into increasingly wild terrain. Asphalt gave way to dirt and dirt to mud. A few tiny hamlets flashed by, and then there was nothing for hours but the unbroken corridor of vegetation and a single-lane bridge across an offshoot of the river. Eve closed her eyes, telling herself to leave everything behind. Her two freeway exits connecting cubicle to gym to home. Mexico City Airport, with its missing-person flyers and machine-gun-toting guards. The flight to Huatulco, jammed with surfers and photographers and families of every stripe and shade. Thoughts of Nicolas flashed—he’d be finishing morning swim practice right about now—and her hand twitched in an instinctive reach for her cell phone, which was long out of range.
    That’s the whole point, her Inner Voice said. Out of range. You wanted this, remember?
    Ernesto—who went by “Neto”—straightened up behind the wheel, flicking back his lush black curls and turning slightly, bringing a doughy nose into profile. “ Listen! One acre of this jungle here has more species of trees and insects than exist in all of Canada. ”
    Though Neto spoke very good English, he maintained his native intonation, hitting all the