“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 soundedterrifyingly 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.
Chapter One
Two Years Later
Watching someone die changed a person. Charlotte was not the same woman she’d been on that cold Manhattan morning. For starters, she no longer lived in Queens, or in New York, for that matter. As she sat facing her dad in a little café near the Northshire University campus in Middleton, Vermont, she tried to summon some enthusiasm for their conversation.
The truth was, sometimes she felt like a part of her had died that morning too. And yes, the woman from the bus had definitely died. Charlotte had found an article on a local news site that confirmed a pedestrian fatality in the financial district that morning.
Charlotte had always felt somewhat adrift in her life, moving from place to place, boyfriend to boyfriend, but after watching that woman die, she was more lost than ever. At the time, Charlotte had taken it as a sign to find purpose in her life, but she’d spent the last two years chasing one dead end after another. Now here she was, back in the town she’d grown up in, the town she’d sworn she wouldneverreturn to after she left twenty-two years ago.
Famous last words. The truth was, Charlotte was getting desperate. When her most recent attempt at finding purpose ended in yet another failure, she’d found herself unexpectedly drawn to the place she’d spent most of her life running from. It was time to face her past. Thirty years ago, Charlotte’s mother vanished without a trace, defining her childhood and shaping the adult she would become.
Yes, she had enough self-awareness to realize her wandering lifestyle was likely rooted in a search for answers she might never find, but she was going to try anyway, dammit. So here she was, back in Vermont and determined to finally find out what happened to her mom. And while she was at it, she also hoped to reconcile with her dad. Their relationship was a work in progress, but that was more than she could have said a few months ago.
“... so I’d really appreciate it if you came.” Her dad gave her an expectant look, drawing her back into the conversation.
“I’ll think about it.” But Charlotte knew she wouldn’t be attending the faculty friends-and-family gathering he hosted every year at his home. The university was a bit of a sore spot for her, and they both knew it.
“I really hope you do.” His smile was somewhat forced, as if he’d read the “no” in her expression.
“I’ll let you know, but right now, I have to get going. I’m about to meet a new client to show her a house. She just moved to the area for a job at the university.” Because everything in this town revolved around Northshire University.
“Oh yeah? What does she teach?”
Charlotte shrugged. “No idea. I’m just here to help her find a house.”
“Okay. See you next week.” Hope glimmered in his eyes. He wanted her back in his life too. Since her return, they’d met for lunch every Sunday after he got out of church, and slowly, things were starting to feel less awkward between them, but they still had a lot of lost time and hurt feelings to make up for.
“Yep. Bye, Dad.” She walked outside, where a cold breeze whipped through her hair, tossing it in her face. Maybe it was time for a haircut.She’d worn it long her whole adult life. Maybe she should get a bob. Or something even more drastic? Like a pixie cut.
It was January, after all. New year, new Charlotte? The problem was, she’d tried out a “new Charlotte” so many times, she almost didn’t know who she was anymore. Had there really been no lesson to learn from that fateful day on the bus? Charlotte had thought that watching someone lose their life was a sign to find purpose in hers, except she’d tried everything she could think of, and nothing had panned out.
