Chapter 3
THE SLOPE
The evening had been going well. This is important to note because of what happens next.
Sophie arrived at seven with a bottle of wine and a tote bag of "stuff I'm cleaning out" that included a candle, a face mask, and a cookbook called Pasta for People Who Cry, which she said reminded her of me. I chose not to unpack that.
The real reason Sophie came was Ethan. She'd been asking about him for three weeks — what does he look like, is he funny, does he have friends, is he tall, how tall, like TALL tall?
— and tonight was the field test. He was coming over for dinner, and Sophie had engineered her visit to overlap by exactly forty-five minutes, which she denied.
"I just happened to be free," she said, pouring wine into a mug because I'd forgotten to wash the glasses.
"You moved a work meeting."
"I shifted a meeting. There's a difference."
He arrived at 7:55. Five minutes early, which meant he'd probably been pacing around the block for ten.
He brought a bag of shelf brackets and the specific confidence of a man who had promised to fix a bookshelf this weekend and intended to follow through.
I took the bag and set it on the counter near the door.
The three of us ate together — pasta, because what else do you make when your kitchen is the size of a generous closet?
Sophie fired her questions. Ethan handled it the way Ethan handles everything — with patience, dry humor, and the occasional glance at me that said is this normal?
to which I returned a look that said yes, and you're doing great.
Sophie liked him. I could tell because she stopped performing her questions and started actually listening to his answers.
Then her phone buzzed.
Her jaw tightened by a millimeter. She tapped the screen with a speed that means I can't ignore this, then held up one finger — sorry, one sec — and stepped into the hallway.
Ethan and I sat very still, the way you do when someone else's crisis is audible through a wall.
Fifteen seconds. Sophie came back looking like a different person.
"I have to go." She was already standing. "My boss just called — massive client crisis in Calgary, I need to be on the first flight out tomorrow morning. I have to go pack and figure out the time difference and — merde — basically now."
She hugged me. Whispered I like him in my ear. Then she was pulling on her coat and grabbing her keys and—
"My car's on the slope," she said. "The ice."
Sophie's car was street-parked on the hill outside my apartment. It was January. The slope that had been manageable two hours ago was now a glossy sheet of black ice that the evening temperature had polished into something closer to a luge track.
Ethan was already at the door. He didn't even stop for the jacket he'd left on the back of my chair.
"I'll get it," he said. "Which one's yours?"
This is the part I've replayed four hundred times.
Sophie's car was a grey Corolla with a dent in the rear bumper from a parking incident she refuses to discuss. It was angled on the slope, the front tires turned toward the curb, the whole thing sitting on a thin membrane of ice.
Ethan walked down to it. Sure-footed — the walk of a man who'd trained to move on unstable surfaces, who'd been on icy rooftops and wet floors and collapse zones. He checked the angle. Checked the tires. Then braced himself behind the car, both hands flat against the trunk.
"Keep it in drive," he called up to Sophie, who was at the driver's side door, phone in one hand, keys in the other, trying to unlock it. "Foot on the brake until I say. Then ease off and steer clear of the curb. I'll push you past the ice."
Sophie got in. Started the engine.
"Ready?" he called.
She started to ease off the brake. But a buzz from her phone on the dash, the glare of its screen — her eyes flicked down for a second. Maybe less. She startled, her foot slipping sideways off the brake and slamming the gas.
The car lurched.
Not cleanly forward. The front tires spun, useless against the ice. The back end broke loose — a sudden, sideways slide, the rear swinging out fast. The bumper caught him at the hip.
Sound: short, thick, wet.
He went down.
He didn't scream. The sound he made was more like all the air leaving him at once — a single, compressed exhale, as if his lungs had been folded shut.
Sophie hit the brake. The car shuddered and stopped, three feet further down, kissing the curb with a tap so gentle it was obscene. The car was fine. The car didn't even notice.
Sophie screamed.
I was down the slope before I'd decided to move. The ice did the work — I half-ran, half-slid, and when I reached him I went down on my knees so hard I felt it in my teeth.
He was on his side. Face grey-white. Hands grabbing at his hip, his pelvis — the kind of grabbing that isn't reaching for something but trying to hold something together.
"Don't move," I said. "I'm calling 911."
My hands were steady on the phone. They'd been shaking all evening — from the wine, from Sophie's visit, from the low-grade anxiety of introducing your best friend to the person you might be falling for — but now they were steady.
911, quelle est votre urgence?
"I need an ambulance," I said, bypassing the French. I gave the address. The words came out faster than I wanted them to, stumbling over each other. "He got hit — a car slid on the ice — he's on the ground — it hit him here, the — I think it's his hip, or lower, the — his pelvis area, he can't—"
D'accord, madame. Est-ce qu'il est conscient? Is he conscious?
"Yes, he's conscious, he's — he can't move—"
On vous envoie une ambulance. Restez en ligne. We're sending an ambulance. Stay on the line.
Sophie was next to me. She'd gotten out of the car. Her face had come apart — every muscle that held her expressions together had simultaneously given up. She was crying silently, and that was worse than sobbing, because Sophie was never silent.
"I did this," she said. "Nora. I — the car — I didn't—"
"It wasn't your fault."
This was a thing to say. Whether it was true was a question I pushed behind the same locked door where I'd put everything else I couldn't afford to feel right now.
"Sophie. You need to go. Your flight."
"I can't leave —"
"The ambulance is coming. I'm here. You can't do anything here."
She stared at me like she hadn't understood the language.
"I can't leave," she said again, smaller this time. "Nora, I hit him."
"I know." The words came out too sharp. I couldn't soften them. If I softened anything, I was going to come apart. "Give me your keys."
"What?"
"Keys. Insurance. Phone on. If anyone needs you, you answer. But you are shaking so hard you can't stand, and I cannot manage you and him at the same time."
"Nora—"
"Now."
She handed me the keys. Then her wallet.
Then her phone, because she couldn't make her fingers work well enough to open the taxi app, so I did it for her.
She kept saying, "I should stay," and I kept saying, "You can't help here," until the words stopped meaning anything and became only instructions.
When the taxi stopped at the bottom of the hill, safely away from the slope, its hazards blinking, I shoved her phone and wallet back into her coat pocket, kept the car keys, and got her moving.
She made it three careful steps before her knees started to go, so I took her elbow and half-walked, half-slid her down the last stretch, looking back at Ethan every few seconds.
Before the door closed, she looked at me one more time — a look that contained everything she wanted to say and nothing she was able to — and whispered, "Tell them it was me."
The taxi turned the corner and she was gone.
I turned back to Ethan.
He was still on the ground. Eyes open. Staring at the sky with the focused blankness of a person channeling every available resource into not screaming.
"Hey," I said, kneeling next to him. "Ambulance is coming. Two minutes."
"Cool," he said. His jaw was so tight the word barely made it out. Then: "I think your best friend's car won."
A seam cracked behind my ribs. Not laughter — something adjacent to it, made of a completely different material.
"Don't make me laugh right now."
"I'm not trying to be funny. I'm trying not to cry. Different skill set." He closed his eyes. Opened them. "The brackets."
"What?"
"The shelf brackets. Inside. They were on sale."
I had left them on the counter. They were still inside, next to the remains of pasta and three mugs of wine. Every normal thing from twenty minutes ago, still exactly where we'd left it.
"They're safe," I said.
"Good." His breath hitched. A look moved in his face that was bigger than pain. "That's good."
The siren arrived — thin at first, then sharp, then everywhere.
They didn't just load him. They moved him with a precision that made my stomach drop, one of them talking him through every breath while another cinched a wide strap around his hips before the lift.
He winced in a way that restructured his entire face, and one of the paramedics said something in French I caught only half of — fracture probable, bassin — and my brain filed the words without processing them, a bill you can't afford to think about right now.
Before they closed the doors, he looked at me.
His face was the color of February. His hand was gripping the stretcher rail.
He opened his mouth — reaching for another joke, another deflection, another piece of armor to put between himself and the fact that he was lying on a stretcher outside my apartment because he'd been trying to help my best friend's car.
But nothing came out. He just looked at me. And the look said something his words had been running from all night.
The paramedic turned to me. "Vous voulez monter?"
Do you want to ride with him?
I opened my mouth. And nothing came out either.
Because getting in that ambulance was a girlfriend thing to do.
Sitting in the front seat, giving his mother's phone number to the intake nurse, being the person they look at when they need someone to make decisions — that was a girlfriend's job.
And I didn't know if I was that. We'd never said it.
We'd been on four and a half dates and we'd kissed twice and he'd brought me shelf brackets and I'd made him pasta and none of that added up to a word I was authorized to use.
The paramedic was waiting. One second. Two.
"I'll — I need to lock up," I heard myself say. "My apartment door is open. And her car—"
He nodded. Closed the doors.
And just like that, the decision was made. I filled the silence with logistics. My apartment door. Sophie's car. Things that needed doing. Reasonable, practical things that a reasonable, practical person would handle before going to the hospital.
The ambulance pulled away. The siren split the silence in half, then quarters, then eighths, until it was a thin line of sound dissolving into the city.
I stood on the ice. Alone.
Sophie's grey Corolla sat against the curb, abandoned, looking like it had absolutely nothing to be sorry about.
I went upstairs. Checked the stove. Put the leftover pasta in the fridge. Locked the door. Each step precise, automatic, the motions of a person who is absolutely fine and has a to-do list and is working through it.
Then I came back down. Got in the Corolla. I pushed Sophie's keys into the ignition and started the engine.
The tires spun for a terrifying second before biting into the strip of pavement beside the curb.
The seat was still adjusted for Sophie — too close to the wheel, mirror angled wrong. I didn't fix either.
And I drove the car that broke him to the hospital where they were trying to put him back together.