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My soaking-wet jeans.

I growl in frustration. A woman could be lying on the road, dying, and I can’t do anything right. It’s like one of those nightmares, where I’m desperately trying to phone my parents, and my fingers keep hitting the wrong numbers.

Reaching into the car, I wipe my hand on the dry cloth seat and then turn on the flashlight. I check under the vehicle first, but there’s nothing there. Then, with the light outstretched before me, I run to the front of the car, only to see nothing except that massive tree.

I wave the phone around the hood, searching for a sign of anyone between the bumper and tree, but the downpour means even the flashlight doesn’t illuminate more than a few inches.

And then suddenly I can see, as everything lights up in another flash of …

I lift my face to the sky. That’s not lightning. There was no thunder—I’d have jumped, and the road is still lit, as if by something behind me.

I turn just as the light swallows me. And then—

Nothing.

TWOHENRY

Henry glances at the phone in the dashboard holder. His younger daughter, Ivy, gave him the holder last time she’d been up from college because she “worried about him” driving around without a Bluetooth-enabled truck. Which made him feel like an old man, his kid pointing out the newfangled gadgets of the modern era.

He’s forty-one, and he knows perfectly well that he could buy a holder, but he doesn’t use his phone when he drives. He’s a paramedic—he’s seen what happens when you take your eyes off the road. But he has to admit the holder is useful for a trip like this, when the GPS kindly warned him of a slowdown and detoured him to …

He peers out the rain-streaked window.

Fuck if he knows where he is. And apparently, the GPS doesn’t either. He lost service a while back. Still, tomorrow he’ll text Ivy and tell her the phone holder came in handy, because that’ll make her happy, which will make him happy.

When he glances at the phone, it confirms no signal. An alert also reminds him that tomorrow is his older daughter Raine’s birthday. A text from his ex suggests they should celebrate Raine’s birthday when she comes home from med school in two weeks.

He and Jenn might have split up shortly after Ivy was born, but they are still friends. They’ve been friends since they were kids. It was just one of those things where you grow up together, fool around in high school, and …

Well, when teens fool around, sometimes there’s a baby, and so they got married, had a second one, and then realized they were just really good friends living together and raising kids. Maybe that should be enough, but Jenn wanted more. She’d found it, with a good man, and Henry …

Henry says he’s still looking, but honestly, he’s not looking all that hard. He has two amazing daughters, a great ex-wife, and a job he loves. And if his life had seemed to stall these last few years—not getting the promotions he’d hoped for, the girls moving away to college, rocky times in the romance department—it was just a slow stretch, and all things considered, his “slow stretch” was better than most people ever had it.

He leans forward to peer out the windshield, and only succeeds in fogging it up more. It’s so damned dark. Add in the rain and the lack of GPS signal, and he really should pull over. He will, as soon as he sees a gas station. Grab a coffee, talk to whoever’s working, and figure out where the hell he is.

His gaze flits automatically to the dashboard clock, and he curses under his breath as he realizes it’s almost midnight. There’s a rule for pulling into remote service stations at night. Or there is, when you look like him, six foot three, Iroquois, and built like the construction worker he’d once been.

That rule says that pit stops are best done before eleven. Otherwise? Well, the last time he was up this way and stopped to get gas around midnight, the lone woman behind the counter watched him like she had one hand on her cell phone and the other on her shotgun. She also told him—completely unbidden—that they didn’t serve alcohol past ten.

He shakes his head at the memory. He knows how to stay cool, hands out of his pockets, hood down, smiling, friendly as can be. Yeah, if he sees a place, he’ll still go in and just play it by ear.

Really, though, when his shift ran late, he should have just waited until morning and driven up in the daylight. It isn’t as if the guys will be out fishing tonight. Just sitting around, playing cards and shooting the shit, which—to be honest—is his favorite part of the getaways and explains why he hadn’t postponed heading up.

He just needs to drive slow, stop somewhere if he can, and if not, maybe pull over until the rain passes. He has a cooler in the back. Grab a Coke and enjoy the storm. He can’t be more than fifty miles away, and the guys will be playing cards for hours yet.

If Henry doesn’t see any lights in the next five miles, he’ll pull over. Hell, he could probably stop right here, in the middle of the road. When’s the last time he saw another vehicle? There’d been two others taking the detour, but they’d turned off long ago.

That gives him pause. If everyone else went another way, does that mean he missed a turn? He doesn’t think so. He’s a very careful driver. Paramedic, again. You see enough accidents and you drive like an old man. You also make sure your girls have modern cars with all the safety features, even if it means your own vehicle does not.

Maybe only the locals had taken that off-ramp, because they knew where they were going, and here he is driving down a road that goes, for all he knows, miles from where he needs to be.

Should he turn around? Yes, it means a long drive back, but if he’s off course, he’s getting farther away with each passing mile. He—

A car appears in his headlights, a woman standing beside it, and it’s right there, as if appearing from nowhere. Henry shouts, foot slamming onto the brake, and then—

The truck rams into the back end of the little car. But Henry barely sees that. All he sees is the woman, the force of the impact sending her flying. Then his pickup stops and everything goes dim, blood rushing to his head as it slams forward and then back into the headrest when the airbag deploys.

Henry sits there, stunned, his shocked brain turning like an engine on a cold day. He hit something. The airbag is deflating around him. Did he skid off the road—?