Chapter Two
Emerson
Nine years ago…
T hirty minutes.
Forty-five minutes.
One hour.
My foot anxiously taps away against the wooden surface while I stare mindlessly at the clock on our kitchen wall.
One hour ten.
My fingers run along the white-marble dining table, the obsessive need to keep moving as time passes and they haven’t returned.
Where are they?
Maybe they’re taking as long as possible so by the time they get home it will be past my curfew.
One hour fifteen.
Dad never trusts me with the car.
I press my fingers between the shutters in our kitchen window, peering out into the transformed night sky, praying to see my parents’ headlights pull up the drive.
Nothing .
One hour twenty.
Dammit, Atlas. You couldn’t have just gotten a taxi?
I grip my hair in chestnut clumps between my fingers, practically burning through the hardwood flooring with my back-and-forth pacing.
The train station is less than fifteen minutes away, have they decided to drive one mile per hour the whole way back or something?
Two hours five.
A lump forms in my suddenly dry mouth, my heartbeat stills, and my blood runs cold as flashing red and blue lights reflect back at me from my drive.
A female officer steps out of the patrol car and makes her way up my drive. It only takes a few seconds before the thump of her hand knocking on the door echoes around me, willing my frozen legs to move.
I gulp, the speed of my movements from a short while ago long gone, and instead, it seems to take every ounce of strength I have to put one foot in front of the other.
My shaky hand stretches out to turn the doorknob, where I’m greeted with the sympathetic smile of the female officer. She looks young, maybe in her mid-twenties. Her auburn hair is pulled back into a neat bun and her chocolate eyes stare back at me, glazed with remorse.
“Miss Fields?” she asks.
I nod.
“Miss Fields, I’m so sorry,” she offers me a weak smile. “ There’s been an accident.”
Oh God.
“Your parents and brother were involved in a hit-and-run,” she continues.
Oh god.
“Your brother is in the ICU with some pretty serious injuries. Again, Miss Fields, I’m so sorry, but your parents,” she pauses, and the weight of my entire world lies on the tip of her tongue, “they didn’t make it.”
Everything that happens next feels like it’s in slow motion, drawing out the overwhelming sadness into unbearable pain.
Oh God.
I can’t hear what she says next, all I can focus on is the feel of the ground beneath me shaking. My heart constricts so tight I feel the sudden urge to throw up, while my brain seems to have forgotten how to breathe, starving my lungs of oxygen. Black dots blur my vision, tunneling me into the darkness of my own self-despair.
No.
Please, no.
The sound of her voice rings in my ears and I feel her hand on my arm, but the room is spinning. The room is spinning so fast that I’m falling to the floor, the hard surface colliding with my knees.
I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to voice any of my emotions, but it feels like there’s a hand down my throat squeezing and crushing any noise I try to make before it reaches my tongue .
Tears stream down my cheeks, promising to drown me in my sorrow and I let them, I let them pivot me into melancholy as the earth shatters beneath me like broken glass, breaking into thousands of delicate pieces and slicing me open, each second a new wound carving into my heart.
Like a puzzle with a missing piece, I’ll never be put back together the same again .
Because my parents…
They’re gone.