Chapter 2: Two Versions Of Me

Katrina POV

The thing about having your life crushed at a dinner table is that nobody offers you a ride home after.

I drove myself in the old Honda, the one they kindly allowed me to keep, which was funny. Three years and I got a 2019 Honda, five thousand dollars, and front-row seats to the most unhinged plot twist of my own life.

It was 11 PM and it rained like the sky was also grieving. I drove with both hands locked on the wheel because if I didn't give them something to hold I honestly didn't know what I'd do with them. The mountains had swallowed the city behind me, nothing ahead but dark road, guardrails catching my headlights in pale flashes, and the kind of silence that pressed against your eardrums.

The rain got heavier as the road climbed, and somehow the past came flooding in.

He'd been standing at the canape table at a charity event looking at the food like it had personally offended him, I was in my second year of med school, nursing the same glass of wine for two hours because I couldn't afford another. He'd appeared beside me and said, completely deadpan. "These things taste like disappointment shaped into circles." And I'd laughed. He'd looked at me like that laugh was the most interesting thing he'd seen all night.

I married him fourteen months later in a dress that took my breath away, in a ceremony that cost more than my entire medical school tuition, and for exactly six month, I was stupidly, completely happy.

A year after the wedding, Emma had said over brunch: "Have you thought about timing? Nicholas would love a family soon." I'd smiled and said we were letting things happen naturally. That same month, she'd "helpfully" booked an appointment with a specialist. By year two I was cutting hospital hours, by year three the fellowship was gone. Every piece of myself I handed over I told myself was a loan.

Nico would find me in the kitchen at midnight after a double shift, arms sliding around me from behind, lips against my neck and I'd lean into him for exactly three seconds before my body remembered it was exhausted in a way that lived in the bone marrow, and I'd pull away, and I'd feel his arms go still around me.

Maybe if I'd been more passionate, if we had sex more, if I'd given him what he wanted, I most likely wouldn't be sitting here in a 2019 Honda, with five thousand dollars in account and nowhere to go. 

The road curved sharper and I adjusted, and tapped the brakes. They felt soft.

I pressed again, harder. The pedal gave more than it should, it sank further, came back with less and something at the base of my spine went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.

Okay. I thought, sitting up straighter. It's wet, the road's wet, it's fine.

The road kept going down and I pressed harder. Still nothing, the pedal hit the floor and stayed there and the car kept moving, kept accelerating with the gradient of the mountain, and my brain did this thing where it went very quiet before it started to scream.

Nothing.

I pumped them twice. Each time the pedal went all the way down like it was mocking me, like the resistance that was supposed to be there had simply ceased to exist, and the mountain road kept curving and I kept not slowing down.

Headlights appeared in my rearview mirror, too close for this road, too close for this weather, sitting right on my bumper like whoever was behind me had decided personal space was a concept that didn't apply to mountain roads in the pouring rain. I checked the mirror, couldn't see the vehicle through the rain and the glare. I edged slightly toward the center line to give them road to pass, but they didn't pass, they sped up.

The impact came from behind, hard and deliberate, and my head snapped forward and I heard myself scream in a voice I didn't recognize, hands wrenching the wheel while the backend fishtailed on the slick asphalt. I barely caught it, my whole body was shaking, my foot was still drilling the useless brake pedal into the floor out of pure reflex, because what else do you do...

The second hit came at an angle, caught the rear passenger corner, the car was already going sideways, and the guardrail came up fast. I hit it at the weak join where two panels met, and it crumpled exactly the way it wasn't supposed to.

Before I knew it there was no road, no rail, no ground.

I was airborne, all four wheels off the mountains and the dark rushing up to meet me and my hands were still on the wheel like that meant something, like holding harder would give me back the control that was already gone. The headlights cut through the rain and lit up nothing useful. Just trees and the terrible speed of them.

 The first one hit the passenger side and the impact traveled through the chassis and into my spine like a shockwave. The second one took the mirror off in a shriek of metal I felt in my back teeth. I was still pressing the brakes, I couldn't stop pressing them even though I knew that I was going through this mountain and the trees weren't going to stop me anymore than I could stop myself.

The underbrush tore at the undercarriage. Rocks scraped the bottom like something trying to hold on. It bounced off a boulder so hard the rearview mirror cracked clean down the middle, my reflection splitting into two versions, one on each side, and I thought, wildly and briefly, that felt about right. There where two versions of me now. The one who'd driven toward the Cruz estate tonight with something almost like hope alive in her chest. And this one, the one currently losing an argument with a mountain.

The car tilted nose-first.

The airbag exploded against my face the same second we hit the water, it was white and chemical-sharp, and I felt my nose crunch and tasted blood immediately and the cold exploded. Not cold like the hospital corridors and stethoscopes against winter skin. This cold lived past cold, on the other side of it, a full-body assault that hit every nerve ending at once and then shut them down. It came through the cracks in the door, the spilt corners of the windshield, every tiny compromise in the chassis that the crash had created, thin vicious streams of river water that found the gaps and kept finding them.

I tried the door, it was jammed completely. Then I tried the window, the electric mechanism made one weak sound and died.

I was trapped. The water reached her ankles, then my knees. I could feel it rising with a slowness that terrified me more than the crash had, it didn't care I was twenty-seven years old and had not yet done a single thing I'd actually meant to do with my life.

The water reached my collarbone and I tilted my head back.

I'd hadn't even gotten the chance to find out. After everything I'd swallowed tonight, the pride, the grief, the rage, I refused to let them see, the universe was going to make me die without knowing if I was pregnant or not.

The water closed over my head and then Everything went black.