CHAPTER TWO: THE CHOICE HE MADE

"Julian, I am here, please look at me."

My voice cracked on his name as I pushed it past the blood in my mouth. Glass glittered across my lap like spilled diamonds, and the steering wheel had folded inward until it pinned my ribs against the seat. Every breath felt like swallowing knives. Rain poured through the shattered windshield and mixed with the warm trickle running down my temple, and the whole world smelled of gasoline and burnt rubber.

Headlights flooded the wreckage a moment later. A car door slammed, and running footsteps splashed through the puddles, and then a voice I would have known in any darkness tore through the storm.

"Veronica! Veronica, where are you?"

My heart lurched with a terrible, foolish hope, because he had come, and he was only a few steps away. I gathered every shred of strength I had left and lifted one trembling hand toward the broken window.

"Julian!" I screamed. "Julian, I am over here!"

His silhouette froze beside my crushed door. The light from his phone swung across my face, and I watched the color drain from his cheeks as he understood whose car he was looking at. He dropped to his knees in the mud, and for one heartbeat his hands shook as they reached for the twisted frame.

"Elise?" he breathed. "What are you doing here? Are you hurt?"

"I am trapped." I swallowed a mouthful of copper. "The door will not open, and I cannot move my legs properly. Please get me out, and please do it quickly, because I am...because we are..."

"Julian!"

The scream came from somewhere behind him, thin and shrill, and it sliced through my sentence like a razor. Veronica was lying on the wet asphalt a few yards from her mangled sedan with her coat spread around her and one hand stretched toward us. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks, and her sobs rose over the sound of the rain.

"Julian, I cannot feel my legs!" she cried. "Please, you have to help me. I am so frightened!"

He turned his head toward her, and I saw the exact moment his body made the choice before his mind could finish the argument. His shoulders twisted away from me. His fingers slid off the edge of my window frame.

"Julian, wait," I said, and I hated how small the words sounded. "Please do not go to her yet. It is the baby. I am pregnant, Julian, and our baby is in danger."

I do not know whether he heard me. The rain was deafening, and the engine of the other vehicle still hissed and screamed from somewhere in the dark, and Veronica was wailing his name over and over like a siren. He pressed his hand briefly against the glass, as though he wanted me to understand something.

"Hold on, Elise," he said, his voice raw. "The paramedics are coming, and they will take care of you. I will be right back, I promise."

I stared at him through the blood stinging my eyes. "You are always right back," I whispered.

He did not hear that either.

I watched him run to Veronica and gather her into his arms, and I watched her wrap both of her arms around his neck and bury her face against his coat. She cried into his collar while he carried her away from the wreckage, and her hair hung across his sleeve like black silk. As he passed my window, her eyes opened, and she looked straight at me. Her tears were still running down her cheeks, but there was no pain in her face at all, only a stillness that made my skin crawl.

Then she closed her eyes again and sobbed his name.

I told myself I had imagined it.

"Julian!" I screamed once more, and the effort tore something loose in my chest. "Julian, please, I am begging you! Please do not leave me here!"

His back remained turned. He moved steadily toward the flashing blue and red lights that had begun to paint the trees at the end of the road, and every step carried him farther from me. I reached through the broken window until my fingers trembled in the empty air, stretching toward a man who was already too far away to touch.

A paramedic reached me before Julian had finished lowering Veronica onto the stretcher. He was a young man with kind eyes and a drenched yellow jacket, and he shouted over his shoulder for the hydraulic cutters as he squeezed his arm through the shattered glass to find my pulse.

"Stay with me, ma'am," he said. "Can you tell me your name?"

"Elise," I managed. "Elise Carrington."

I had not used that name in four years. It rose from my lips as naturally as a prayer, and the paramedic simply nodded and wrote it on his glove with a marker, because in that moment I was only another patient in the rain.

"Elise, I need you to keep talking to me. Where does it hurt?"

"Everywhere." I tried to laugh, and the sound turned into a cough. "My stomach hurts the most."

His face changed, only slightly, but I saw it. He glanced down at the seat beneath me, and then he turned and bellowed for a second team with an urgency that made my blood run cold.

"What is wrong?" I asked. "What did you see?"

"Nothing yet, ma'am. Just stay awake for me."

Beyond his shoulder I could see the ambulance doors standing open under the strobing lights. Julian was climbing inside with Veronica's hand clasped between both of his, and the paramedic who closed the doors behind him did not even glance in my direction. The vehicle's siren swelled into the night, and its taillights shrank down the dark road until the trees swallowed them whole.

He had not turned around once.

A strange warmth spread beneath me, slow and heavy, and a terrible quiet crept into my bones as the cutters began to shriek against the metal of my door. I pressed my palm flat against my stomach, where the sonogram still sat crumpled in my coat pocket, and I felt the small, fragile flutter of hope inside me falter.

"Please," I whispered to the child I had known for only a single day. "Please, just a little longer."

The paramedic's voice cracked through the roar of machinery behind me. "We are losing her pressure, get the second stretcher over here now!"

And then the darkness came up to meet me.