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“So what happened?”
“Her grandfather gave her this Mustang as her first car. I liked speed, but she was reckless. I didn’t even like driving with her, but she’d laugh and tell me I could handle it.”
Testing his manhood. Not something you did for someone you loved.
“Sounds immature to me,” she said.
“She was that. A few months before graduation, we went out to the movies. It was dark when we were leaving and she hit the gas to pull out in front of a car that she shouldn’t have. It was a big truck. It hit us in the driver’s door. I just remember her body being thrown and the seatbelt snapping her back. I lost consciousness after that. It was like this slow-motion thing you see in the movies. I felt this pain in my arm and shoulder, across my chest and nothing at all.”
“How badly were you hurt?” she asked.
Grace knew her jaw was open. She couldn’t believe he’d never mentioned this. Never mentioned anything when she pointed out scars on his body. She assumed they were from being in the service.
“I broke my left collarbone and my wrist. I had surgery on my collarbone; my wrist was fine. I thought for sure I wouldn’t be able to get into the service then and all my plans were gone. I felt like shit when I woke up and my parents told me what happened, that it was my first thought my career was gone before it started.”
“I’d think that was natural,” she said. “More so if you were using that to get away with someone.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“What happened to Lara?” she asked.
“She broke her back. She’s in a wheelchair. Her parents have blamed it all on me.”
“You weren’t even driving,” she said.
“No. No drugs or alcohol or anything. Just Lara being reckless as I said. The guy that hit us died. He didn’t have his seatbelt on. There were no tickets issued. Lara’s family knew people. I don’t know. I think they looked at the fact this teenage girl was in serious condition, I wasn’t in any better shape. The guy that hit us, he would have been ticketed for no seatbelt. He’d had some run-ins with the law. Drugs and alcohol. He was clean that day, but I think no one cared all that much about him and that made it worse for me.”
“Do you know that for a fact?” she asked.
“No. It was just the talk from Lara’s parents after. Again, I was a kid.”
“And her parents blamed you even though you weren’t driving? Because she was in a wheelchair she couldn’t go with you? Did she blame you?”
Grace was trying to understand this. Did Lincoln feel as if he let Lara down?
“She blamed me. She was even more pissed when I healed and was still going to leave. She said I was nothing more than a piece of shit abandoning her, but it’s not like I’d seen her much before I left. Her parents wouldn’t let me in to see her.”
“She had to be able to reach you via text or something,” she said.
“She did. She was.” He looked up at her, his eyes a little glossy. “Grace. She’d been pregnant.”
“Oh,” she said. She was hurt just as he’d said she’d be. She was ticked off too.
Why wouldn’t he say this to her? She wouldn’t have thought poorly of him. She would have had sympathy for him.
Which of course he wouldn’t want and some of it was now making sense. Someone as prideful as Lincoln wouldn’t want pity or sympathy, even from a loved one.
“We didn’t know,” he said. “I believed she didn’t know. She would have told me. She would have used that as another reason to get married right away. Her parents would have pushed it to save face. But they’d taken blood work before surgery and found out.”
“What happened to the baby?” she asked. “If you tell me you’ve got a child out there...”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. She lost it. She was only a few weeks along. Her parents were told. They wanted the doctors to terminate the pregnancy.”
“That’s horrible,” she said.
“They didn’t. They told her parents they wouldn’t do that. They were going to try to see if they could repair all the damage to Lara. They didn’t. They couldn’t. She had a spinal cord injury. Chances are she wouldn’t have carried the baby to term anyway. It wasn’t meant.”
Grace wanted to argue with him about that statement but didn’t. “Fast forward to why you’re telling me now,” she said.
