Prologue #2
She wished . . . well, she wished she had at least gotten the woman’s name.
Maybe they could have followed each other on Instagram or something.
This was the problem she sometimes had when she started conversations with random people.
She’d meet someone she’d like to keep in touch with, and while she did occasionally exchange names or social media handles with them, most times the connection ended just like this one.
Somehow, this moment, this connection had felt like . . . more.
Charlotte often felt adrift in her life, always making these fleeting connections. She sought new experiences, new dating apps, new coffee shops, sometimes even new cities in search of . . . well, she’d know when she found it, hopefully.
She slid into the seat the woman had just vacated and glanced out the window, watching her former seatmate cross the street.
She was taller than Charlotte had realized, and there was an elegance to the way she moved.
As Charlotte watched, the woman turned her head, looking back in Charlotte’s direction.
The bus’s horn sounded suddenly, long and loud. Charlotte jumped, glancing at the driver. What the hell? Someone screamed, and Charlotte looked back out the window just in time to see a black SUV speed past the bus and slam into several pedestrians who had been crossing the street. Oh god.
The woman Charlotte had just shared a conversation with lay crumpled on the slushy pavement.
Another woman was on her hands and knees beside her.
It happened so fast that it hardly felt real.
Charlotte’s chest began to burn, and she realized she’d stopped breathing.
A prickly feeling crawled over her skin, and for a moment, she thought she was going to be sick.
All around her, people gasped and cried out, their exclamations hammering home the reality of the situation.
On the street, Charlotte’s former seatmate hadn’t moved.
The other woman was sitting beside her now, cradling an arm against her chest. Charlotte heard a tinny voice nearby saying “911, what is your emergency?”
“Several people just got hit by a car!” a panicked man said.
Charlotte sucked in a much-needed lungful of air, and then she was moving.
She lurched out of her seat and bolted down the aisle.
On the street, there were more screams, more people on the phone—presumably with 911—but no one was doing anything.
The SUV came to a stop about twenty feet down the road, and the driver got out and started shouting.
Charlotte couldn’t make out the words over the roaring in her ears. She approached the women who’d been hit. One woman was clutching her arm, crying, while Charlotte’s seatmate lay flat on her back at the edge of the street. Her eyes were closed, and her body was too still.
Fuck.
Was she dead? Charlotte’s mind replayed how the vehicle had flung her, the brutal way she’d slammed into the pavement. Seeing something like that in person was so shocking, so violent. Blood stained the snow around the woman’s head.
Stop the bleeding.
The thought popped into Charlotte’s head, maybe from all the hours she’d spent watching one of her favorite TV shows, 9-1-1.
She dropped to her knees. Where was the blood coming from?
Charlotte swept a quick gaze over the woman’s body, and oh god, her right leg looked weird.
Like, obviously broken. Charlotte’s stomach lurched.
“Hey.” She reached for one of the woman’s hands. Her skin was cold and clammy against Charlotte’s. “Can you hear me?”
The brunette’s eyes fluttered and then opened, and Charlotte wanted to cry from relief because she was alive.
Her fingers twitched, and her features twisted into an expression Charlotte knew she would never forget.
To call it a grimace was too tame. The woman’s face radiated a visceral kind of agony that was absolutely horrifying.
Her eyes met Charlotte’s, glassy and desperate. “Help.”
“I will.” Charlotte darted another panicked glance down the woman’s battered body.
She seemed to have taken the impact of the SUV on her right side, which made sense from the direction she’d been walking.
Her breath came in fast, shallow gasps, and her expression indicated a level of pain Charlotte couldn’t even fathom.
By now, other passersby had gathered, surrounding them in a circle of concerned faces and anxious murmuring. Charlotte had no idea what to do. “Does anyone have medical training?” she called, her voice high pitched and shrill.
Heads shook all around her. Peripherally, she was aware that the other woman who’d been hit was sitting on the curb now while a passerby attended to her.
“Do you know where you’re hurt?” Charlotte asked her seatmate as she debated her next move. She knew not to move the woman in case of a spinal injury. Trying to stop the bleeding still seemed like a good idea, though.
It felt like an eternity had passed since the accident, but it had probably been less than a minute.
These moments felt so much more exaggerated in real life than they appeared on TV.
In a TV show, you would see the accident, and then it would cut to the arrival of the ambulance. In reality, every second dragged.
There was so much blood. It had seeped into Charlotte’s pants as she knelt in the street, but hopefully the snow was diluting it, making it look worse than it was.
Maybe her seatmate wasn’t as badly injured as it seemed.
Charlotte would get her name and visit her in the hospital, bring her flowers and candy and read her another horoscope.
What at first looks like a new beginning might actually be an ending.
That ominous line from Charlotte’s horoscope flitted through her mind, and she shuddered, rejecting what it might mean. But, as she watched, the woman’s eyes closed. Her mouth hung slightly open. Her skin was ashen. Even her lips looked gray.
“I’m going to see if I can find where you’re bleeding from, okay?” Charlotte spoke loudly and firmly, trying to sound more confident than she felt. The woman’s eyes flickered open, a silent scream held in their depths, before closing again.
Charlotte felt another punch of adrenaline. With fingers almost numb from the cold, she ran a hand through the woman’s hair, locating a gash in her scalp, which was hopefully the source of all the blood. Head wounds bled a lot. She remembered reading that somewhere.
In the distance, she heard sirens. Thank god. Her gut said this woman was in real trouble. The ashy tint to her skin was terrifying.
“The ambulance is almost here,” Charlotte told her.
The woman’s eyes opened sluggishly. “Help,” she repeated.
“Can you tell me what hurts?” Charlotte asked somewhat desperately.
Her eyes rolled back for a moment, and then she blinked, looking up at Charlotte. “I can’t feel . . . can’t feel anything.”
Charlotte’s chest tightened. Did she have spinal cord damage?
Charlotte had already noticed how shallow and rapid the woman’s breathing was, but now she saw that the left side of her chest seemed to rise more than the right, as if the right side had .
. . collapsed. A thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth.
Her eyes were unfocused, the pupils blown wide.
Not sure what else to do, Charlotte took the woman’s hand in hers the way she had before, trying not to notice how cold it was, how limp. “Stay with me,” she said. “The sirens are getting louder. The ambulance must be almost here.”
The woman’s eyes focused on her for a moment, and Charlotte forced a smile. She gave her fingers another squeeze, then reached out with her free hand to brush a damp strand of dark hair from the woman’s face, offering what comfort she could.
“I—” the woman gasped.
“What? You what?” Charlotte held tight to her icy fingers, willing the ambulance to hurry up.
She felt something hard pressing into her palm and looked down.
There was a gold band on the woman’s ring finger.
She was married. She had a family out there, people who loved her.
She had to survive. Charlotte barely knew her, but she desperately wanted her to live.
“I don’t think . . . I’m going . . . to make it,” the woman whispered, her words broken by desperate gasps for air.
“Don’t say that,” Charlotte cried, but the woman’s eyes had closed again. Her features went slack. She was so gray. Lifeless. “Hey! Just hang in there another minute.”
Charlotte squeezed her hand, hard enough to hurt, in an attempt to revive her. The woman didn’t respond.
A fire truck arrived on the street in a wail of sirens and a whirling mass of lights, followed rapidly by an ambulance. The crowd began to fall back as people made room for the first responders to come through. Soon two men in uniform had crouched beside Charlotte.
Someone took Charlotte’s shoulders, guiding her backward to give them room to work. The crowd converged around her, people offering words of support and asking questions about the woman’s status that she couldn’t answer.
Charlotte wiped away a tear as the EMTs worked on the woman, their movements swift and efficient. They’d secured a plastic collar around her neck and were calling out medical jargon that sounded terrifyingly serious. She caught “vitals unstable” and “BP seventy-two over forty and falling.”
One of them secured a brace to the woman’s broken leg, and then they put her on a backboard. Through all this commotion, the woman remained unconscious.
“Sats are dropping,” an EMT said. “We need to move now.”
Then they were rushing toward the ambulance. Charlotte pushed forward, desperate to know what would happen next.
“She’s crashing,” someone called, just as an alarm began to scream.
Charlotte stared in horror. The blaring alarm made it abundantly clear that the woman’s heart had stopped beating.
The EMTs were still moving, working, trying to bring her back.
As the ambulance’s doors began to close, one of the EMTs shook her head, and the look on her face told Charlotte everything she needed to know.
The doors slammed shut, the sound reverberating in Charlotte’s skull like a death knell.
They’d lost her.