The steady hum of the road fractures.
Tires losing grip.
A sound I will learn to identify as hydroplaning, as tread on wet asphalt giving way, as physics betraying every promise the universe ever made me.
“Lee—”
My name. Just my name.
Not a scream. A question.
Like she’s confused about what’s happening, like the car is doing something she doesn’t understand, and the first person she reaches for is me.
Then the impact.
Metal. Glass.
A sound so violent it doesn’t register as real—it’s too big, too loud, a compression of noise that punches through the phone speaker and cracks something in the center of my chest.
The phone must go flying because the audio warps, distorts, and then there’s a secondary crash—smaller, duller.
The car settling. The world finishing what it started.
I’m off the wall.
I don’t remember moving but I’m standing in the parking lot in the misting rain with the phone pressed so hard against my ear the plastic creaks.
“Rose.”
Nothing.
“Rose!”
The line is still connected.
I can hear things.
Rain on crumpled metal.
The tick of a cooling engine.
Something hissing—steam or fluid, something leaking from something broken.
And underneath all of it, so faint I have to stop breathing to catch it, a sound that might be a breath. One breath. Shallow. Wet.
Then nothing at all.
I’m screaming her name.
I know this because brothers pour out of the clubhouse behind me—Phantom, Colt, Shadow—and someone grabs my shoulders but I wrench free because I need to hear, I need to listen, she might say something, she might?—
“Lee.” Shadow’s voice. Close. Steady. His hand on my arm, his other hand taking my free hand and putting keys into it. No. Taking keys out of his own pocket. “Lee. Truck. Now.”
I can’t drive.
My hands are shaking so hard I can’t close my fingers.
Shadow takes the keys back, steers me to the passenger side, and we’re moving before I can process any of it.
