Chapter 66
VERY SLOWLY, I PULL into Hailey’s friend’s driveway.
Hailey and Alison are taking turns tossing a basketball into a hoop mounted over the garage door.
When Hailey sees me drive up, she frowns.
I get it. She’s annoyed that I’m picking her up four hours early.
She doesn’t hear me hyperventilating. She doesn’t know I’m this close to passing out.
She walks over to me, ready to argue, then sees all the damage to the car and the bloody dog on my lap. She starts to scream.
With Austen in my arms, I stumble out of the car and fall to my knees.
Hailey and Alison are both screaming now, and Alison’s mother comes rushing out their front door.
She scoops Austen up as I sit and lean back against the car, still dizzy, my arms covered with blood.
Is any of it mine? I don’t think so. But Austen is so tiny. Could all that blood be his?
Soon Alison’s mother is back. I want to ask her how Austen is doing, but I don’t have the strength.
“I’m Lynne,” she says, kneeling down beside me with a glass of water. We’ve seen each other but never spoken before. Does this count as a Hollywood “meet-cute”?
“Are you in any pain?” she asks.
I try to speak but no sound comes out. Just breath. I mouth the word no.
“Don’t talk,” she says. “Later, you can tell us what happened.”
What happened? Good question. I’m trying to remember. At some point, the black car crashed into me. Amber’s car spun around and slammed front-first into the guardrail. Then the driver sped away.
I must have blacked out for a moment. When I came to, I was dizzy and seeing double.
Jane was barking like crazy in the back seat, but where was Austen?
I turned around to look for him. When we hit the rail, he must have been tossed like a projectile, because the little guy was lying on the floor behind me, silent, bleeding.
I began to sob then. At some point I must have gotten out of the car to gather him up in my arms. I’d put Alison’s address into the GPS before I left the house, and it wasn’t far away, so, still wobbly, still dizzy, I started the car.
The engine sputtered but worked. Slowly, I pulled away from the rail, back into the service lane, hoping I was lucid enough to drive and that the car would hold up until we got to Alison’s house.
I’d made it. Sort of.