“Oh, God,” she said. “Please, no.”
Chapter 43
The CR-V barreled through the overgrowth while Grant cradled his sister’s head in his lap. His father could still handle a car, hooking it around potholes and dead logs while the meager headlights illuminated a solid wall of fog that was always just ahead of them.
Jim called back, “How far’s Leavenworth?”
“Forty-five minutes,” Grant said, dropping Paige’s phone on the seat.
“We’ll make it in half the time. And they have a hospital?”
“Barely.”
The headlights dipped suddenly as the SUV bottomed out with a sharp metallic scrape.
Paige’s head lifted and fell back into his lap.
She moaned, clutching her side.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Jim said. “Didn’t catch that one in time.”
Grant could see the worried creases above his father’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“How we doing back there?” Jim asked.
“We’re doing great,” Grant said.
Paige mouthed, “Liar. It really hurts.”
“I know.”
“I can barely stand it.”
He held her hand and let her squeeze it.
The trip back to the highway took only half as long as the drive in.
Soon, they were speeding east on smooth pavement.
Grant pushed his fingers through Paige’s hair.
She stared up at him, cheeks pale, eyes heavy. Her skin felt cool and clammy.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice just a whisper now.
“Don’t. Just relax. Everything’s gonna be fine.”
“I made you hurt someone.”
“That man shot my sister. He got off easy.”
Paige’s smile showed dark-red blood between her teeth.
Grant’s stomach tightened.
A liver hit.
“Are you cold?”
She nodded.
He slipped out of his North Face and draped it over her.
They rode on.
Climbing.
Paige’s breathing growing faster, more shallow. Beads of sweat forming on her face.
Her eyes had become slivers of white.
“Stay with me,” Grant said, squeezing her hand.
She gasped and cut loose a rattling cough.
Red foam appeared at the corners of her mouth.
Her lips moved.
“What was that?” Grant brought his ear so close to her mouth he could hear the bloody vibrato in her lungs.
She drew a tiny breath, let it escape in the smallest whisper: “Bad sister.”
The words detonated inside of him.
Grant brushed a few strands of hair away from her face.
“Stop it.”
He could feel her blood soaking through his pants. There was too much of it.
Grant looked up.
“Hey.”
Caught his father’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
They were hauling ass around a sharp turn, the tires just beginning to screech.
“How much longer, Dad?”
“I don’t know. Twenty? Twenty-five?”
“We’re gonna be pushing it.”
Jim’s eyes took on a shadow. He focused back on the road.
Grant looked down at his sister.
He smiled through a sheet of tears.
She said, “I heard what you just said.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t hurt much anymore.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“We’ll find some water for you.”
“Everything looks grey. And I think ... that might be the end coming. I can hardly see you, Grant.”
“I’m right here, Paige.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“I’m so glad it was you,” he said.
“What?”
“Can you hear me?”
It was a splinter of a nod.
“I know we hurt each other, but I wouldn’t have traded you for anything. Do you know that? I need you to know it in your heart.”
The edges of her mouth curled.
He leaned down and kissed her forehead.
Jim said, “Grant.”
“Yeah?”
“How we doing?”
“She’s bleeding to death, Dad. We’re not gonna make it.”
Grant looked up, saw a new intensity enter his father’s eyes.
Jim Moreton said, “There’s another way.”
Chapter 44
There was a distant squeaking sound, but otherwise the world stood silent.
The highway was empty.
Streamers of fog swept across the pavement.
Sophie drifted over the double yellow to the other side of the road. Doesn’t mean anything, she told herself. This could have happened two days ago. Two weeks ago.
On the shoulder, her boots crunched through a crust of blackened snow.
She climbed carefully over the ragged metal and stared down the side of the mountain.
Her breath caught.
An upslope breeze carried the strong scent of gasoline.
Several hundred feet down the mountain, barely visible through the trees and the fog, she spotted Paige’s CR-V. The vehicle had come to rest on its backend, the undercarriage propped and teetering against a fir tree, its headlights still blasting twin tubes of light up through the fog.
The squeaking she’d heard was the sound of one of the front wheels, still turning.
Steam or smoke poured out of the crumpled hood.
She counted four bare spots on the snowy hill where the car had struck ground, scoured out the snowpack, and flipped.
“Grant!” Her voice echoed off invisible mountains. “Can anyone hear me?”
She dialed 911 and then started down.
The slope was steep, at least thirty degrees, and a good two or three feet of snow covered the ground, the tops of evergreen saplings just poking through.
She descended as fast as she could, but she kept falling, and the snow was going down her boots with every step, her clothes and hair becoming powdered with snow.
The wheel had stopped turning by the time she closed in on the CR-V and the stench of gas was potent. The snow wasn’t as deep in the trees, only coming to her knees.
She passed a handful of smaller evergreens that had been broken in two as the car crashed through them, the smell of splintered wood and fresh sap mixing in with the gas.
Sophie stopped twenty feet away.
She was shivering, her hands numb, legs burning with cold.
The engine hissed.
Through the driver-side window, she could see Jim Moreton. Because of the angle of the car, he was lying back in his seat, still strapped in, his head resting unnaturally against his left shoulder.
“Mr. Moreton.”
He didn’t move.
She stepped closer to the car, now peering in through the rear passenger window. The backseat was empty, the seats soaked with blood. She looked at the windshield—a gaping hole, exploded from within.
Sophie turned and studied the hillside. The twisted guardrail seemed a thousand miles away.
From this perspective, she could see the path the CR-V had taken, punching through the guardrail, then plunging a hundred feet before it hit.
At the second point of impact, she glimpsed a smaller path that branched off and carved down the slope.
It appeared to terminate fifty yards from where she stood at the forest’s edge.
She waded through the snow, using the saplings and branches in proximity to keep her upright. Every step was a struggle, and she was sweating after only a minute.
Ten feet out, she spotted the gray of Paige’s coat.
She was lying facedown in the snow and there was blood all around her. Sophie bent over and dug two fingers into her carotid.
Twenty feet deeper in the woods, she found Grant.
He was lying on his back.
Eyes open. Not breathing.
Sophie sat down beside him in the snow.
“Look at you,” she whispered.
She took his left hand into hers and leaned over and cried.
There would be times in the coming weeks when the numbness would subside and Sophie would remember a cool night in June when she had driven a slightly-too-drunk Grant home from the Stumbling Monk. It was an office party, someone’s birthday, and they had spent the evening talking with their knees nearly touching and sometimes touching underneath the bar while the rest of the precinct roared at each other in the booths behind them. This was the night she had surprised herself with her own feelings. After everyone left, she drove him home and they sat in the car outside of Grant’s house, their hands so close that the summer breeze coming in through the open windows could have blown them together. She had wanted nothing more than to slide her fingers into his. To hold them. Let them take her inside. But she didn’t. And neither did he. That would be the ritual they shared. Two years of walking right up to the door that held everything they wanted, but never opening it. So there would be times in the coming weeks when she would think back to that first moment in the car and how she had been too scared to reach for his hand, and then remember this last one, sitting beside him on a cold foggy morning, when she did.