“So…what? He messaged you in the night?”
“This morning, I guess. Five or some shit.Why are you asking me?”
“A coach went off Whitefen Bridge this morning. Straight in the river. It’s a mass casualty incident.”
“Okay.” His dark mood is starting to make sense. Bhodi’s a critical care nurse. If there’s a drama at the hospital, he’s not coming home anytime soon. “But he’s okay, though, right? Bhodi? He’ll just be knackered when he gets?—”
“Bhodi’s fine. Sab, it’s not that.”
“Then what the fuck is it?”
I raise my voice by accident. Esme startles, dropping her pie, and I step around Tam to correct my mistake.
He clamps a hand around my arm. “Sab.Some of the casualties are emergency workers—firefighters. And it’s bad, brother. I’m so fucking sorry.”
Tam’s right next to me, but I hear him speak as if we’re a thousand miles apart. None of what he’s saying makes sense. The words, they don’t line up in my head, and my brain can’t catch a thought except his name.
Galen.
I pull my arm free and cross the room to where Esme sits, scooping her up to sit her on my hip, angling her away from the TV. “Put it on.”
Tam hesitates.
I snatch the remote and do it myself, and the TV clicks on to the local news—a drone shot of a coach lying mangled in the black water, twisted and broken, the white of the snow on the banks cast blue by a horde of emergency vehicles.
Ambulances.
Police cars.
Fire engines.
My pulse scrapes a dull thud, gaze caught on a pump that looks just like any other, and yet somehow, I know it’s not.
I know it’s his.
Galen’s.
Even before the headlines rolling across the bottom of the screen hit home.
RESCUE WORKERS MISSING AFTER CATASTROPHIC BRIDGE CRASH.
Galen
The cold eats me alive. In the water, I don’t shiver. I kick. I fight. Then I realise my limbs aren’t listening anymore and it doesn’t seem important. Maybe because I should be worrying about my ribs shattering with the need to breathe. Or the sky above, which should be getting lighter, fading to a blurred fog until there’s nothing but endless black.
But I don’t worry about anything.
I drift.
For minutes. Hours, maybe. However it’s counted, it’s long enough for time to lose all meaning. Long enough for Sab to return to the forefront of my meandering thoughts, as if he’s the only thing that can pull me from the death goblins lurking in the frigid water.
Perhaps he is.
Or maybe he’s too late. BecauseIwas too late, and it’s a thought that has my head jerking up, vision re-focussing before it splinters again, the black dragging me deeper.
Sonny.
Something inside me twists, but it isn’t enough to rouse me.
