She Didn’t Know What She Lost

On a holiday weekend, Carter refuses to give his wife Abigail's sponsored student, Mason Hayes, a ride home, since his car is packed. That night Abigail tells him Mason walked the highway, and after Carter drinks the water she pours him, everything goes black. He wakes on an empty highway under a brutal sun, where Abigail livestreams his humiliation beside Mason and offers him a choice: apologize to Mason or walk all fifty miles. The chat bets on how far he will make it.

As the crowd mocks him, Carter recalls six years of marriage and the Blackwing Division he gave up to marry her, and the incidents that followed Mason's arrival: the basketball game, the stolen proposal, the spilled coffee. He finally understands that the problem was never that he had done enough; he was in the way. When he tells the camera to come and pick him up, Abigail orders the bodyguard to release the hounds, though she knows he has feared dogs since childhood.