"Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I'm sorry."
I hold her tight enough that the shaking has something to push against. I let her cry for a while. Then I ease her back, keep my hands on her shoulders, and look.
Bruising on her left cheekbone. Abrasions across both hands, the kind the airbag powder leaves. A small cut near her hairline.
"It's just a car," I make my voice be as close to normal as possible, "Cars can be replaced. Are you hurt anywhere I can't see?"
She shakes her head, but the crying doesn't stop.
"Charlotte, look at me." I wait until she does. Her eyes are swollen, mascara tracked down both cheeks. "What happened?"
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Her gaze slides past me, toward the Volvo, toward the police lights, and lands somewhere to the left where I haven't looked yet.
I follow it.
Twenty feet away, a girl is standing on the roadside with two officers. She's trying to walk a straight line. She's failing. Her steps weave, her balance catches and corrects a beat too late, and even from here I can see the coordination is gone. One of the officers writes something down. The other watches with a bored expression on his face that conveys he has seen this situation one too many times.
Charlotte makes a low, wrecked sound.
The man who'd been holding her steps forward. Mid-twenties, nervous, shifting his weight between his feet. "I was driving behind them," he says. "Saw the car lose control and pulled over to help."
He glances at Charlotte. She glances back. Something passes between them that reads like embarrassment, or apology.
I look at Charlotte. "You were speeding."
"William, I—"
"She wasn't driving," the man says.
What the— "Who was?"
Charlotte's mouth presses into a thin line. Her fingers curl against the sleeves of her jacket, pulling the fabric over her knuckles, and she won't look at me.
"Charlotte. Who was driving your car?"
The silence that follows is very telling.
"Sienna Cross," she whispers.
Cross.
The name lands in my skull like a nail driven flush. Every muscle in my back seizes at once, and the rest of the night fades to noise.
Cross. The family that employed my parents until they were used up and discarded. The name my father whispered the week before he died, when the morphine loosened what ten years of silence had held, and I sat beside his bed and promised him I would make it right.
I try to control my anger. "I told you to stay away from that family."
"Will, it's not—"
"You told me you weren't friends anymore. You told me she snubbed you. Multiple times. That she thought she was too good for you."
Charlotte flinches. "You don't know—"
"I know she has an addiction problem." I lower my voice. "And I know you let a girl with that history drive your car. At two in the morning. On a road like this, while she was clearly out of her mind."
I look back at the girl.
She's stopped trying to walk the line. She's standing still now, her arms wrapped around herself, her face a mess of bruising, her eyes rimmed red and unfocused under the police lights. Unsteady. Small.
