The tires hissed over flooded gravel.
Outside, the storm sounded alive.
A bolt of pain tore through Eleanor so sharply that white light burst at the edges of her vision.
She reached for his sleeve.
He jerked away from her like her touch disgusted him.
“Please,” she said. “Call 911.”
Garrett opened his door instead.
He stepped out into the rain, walked around the hood, and yanked open her door.
Cold water slammed into her face.
“No,” she sobbed, clutching the seatbelt. “Garrett, don’t do this.”
His hands trembled as he hit the buckle.
For half a second, she thought that meant he would stop.
Then he caught her under the arms and dragged her out.
Her bare feet hit water and stone.
Pain shot up both legs.
She dropped to one knee in the mud, scraping skin away on the gravel, one hand sinking into the roadside dirt.
She looked up at him through the rain.
“You’re going to kill me.”
Garrett stood over her with water running down his face like grief he had not earned.
“You were already dying,” he said. “I’m just done dying beside you.”
Then he got back into the car.
Eleanor crawled toward the open door.
“Garrett!”
For one suspended second, he looked at her through the streaked glass.
She saw the man she had married.
She saw the man who had once held her hand in a waiting room.
She saw the man who had signed hospital forms for her when her fingers shook too badly to hold a pen.
Then she saw the man he truly was.
The engine growled.
Mud sprayed behind the tires.
The red taillights smeared through the storm and disappeared into the dark.
Eleanor was left on the shoulder with no shoes, no phone, no purse, no strength, and no one who knew where she was.
She tried to crawl.
Her palms slipped in the mud.
The rain filled her mouth when she called his name again.
No answer came.
Five minutes later, headlights rose through the rain.
They belonged to an old produce truck with one weak lamp and a cracked windshield.
Calvin Brooks was driving home from a late delivery of peaches and tomatoes when he spotted something on the side of the road.
At first, he thought it was a ripped tarp.
Then the tarp moved.
Calvin hit the brakes so hard the truck fishtailed.
He threw it into park and climbed down into the storm with his jacket dragged over his head.
“Ma’am?”
Eleanor tried to answer.
Only a broken sound came out.
When Calvin got close enough to really see her, his face changed.
He was a broad man in his late fifties with silver in his beard and hands made rough by crates, rope, pallets, and years of work that started before sunrise.
He had seen wrecks.
He had seen drunk men asleep in ditches.
He had seen people make a mess of their lives and call it bad luck.
He had never seen fear like the fear in Eleanor’s eyes.
Her lips were split.
