“And if I don’t?” I asked, challenging his instructions.
He turned to me pointedly. “You will.”
I swallowed hard and forced my gaze back to the road. My head buzzed so loud it drowned out the hum of the tires. The freeway stretched wide ahead of us. The lanes were still empty this early in the morning. A curve loomed sharp and sudden ahead. The guardrail jagged and punched in from years of collisions. My pulse surged.
I thought of Oliver, curled in his bed and waiting for me to come home. His sweet face. Tears pricked my eyes. But then I thought of the people drinking coffee in their offices downtown right now. Laughing and scrolling through their phones while they waited for their order. The kids headed to their first dentist appointments, bouncing around in the lobby with all their anxious energy. All of them completely oblivious that death was barreling toward them in a LA city truck. The families that would get calls from the coroner that their loved ones were dead.
It was too much for me. Someone had to stop him.
Could I do it?
I clenched the wheel. Knuckles white. All the trees lined the passenger side. We were going to come around the big curve right before San Bernardino. Just outside of LA County. My heart hammered in my chest. I took one huge breath. Deep and final. Right as we came around the bend.
I slammed on the gas and yanked the wheel to the right.
The truck screamed. The tires shrieked against asphalt. It happened so fast. The world tilted. Blurred. Skies. Trees.
Impact.
Metal shrieked and glass shattered.
My body whipped forward and cracked against the dash. All the air stolen from my lungs. The world went white, then black, and finally red. I heard Dawson screaming from far away. Or maybe it was me. Every nerve blazed white hot. I couldn’t tell if I was dying.
All I knew was that I’d stopped him.
And that was the only thing that mattered.
Chapter Fourteen
Iwoke to the smell of antiseptic and harsh fluorescent lights. The soft hum of machines had been my constant soundtrack for the past three days, since I came to in the back of the ambulance after I drove the truck into a tree. Even with my seat belt, I’d still taken a hard hit to my forehead, requiring several stitches. But I was alive and that was all that mattered. So were hundreds of people. Dawson had planned to blow up the entire building.
He was alive too, but barely. He was in critical condition, and guarded around the clock. The detectives were still combing through all his things. They’d gone through the truck, his backpack, and his home. His plan had been elaborate and thought out. Where he’d channeled all his loss. They’d found blueprints, homemade bombs, and boxes of ammunition, coupled with pages from his notebook, where he’d spelled out exactly what he was going to do. He’d come close.
I was so thankful it was over. That I’d stopped him.
The knock at my door was soft and hesitant. I regretted telling my mom that I wanted to meet Dawson’s wife in private. I was suddenly so nervous I didn’t even know if I’d be able to talk. At least not in coherent sentences.
She stepped into my room. She was small boned and wore an oversize cardigan like a blanket, wrapped around her body. Her chestnut hair was streaked with gray at the temples and pulled back into a loose bun that had half fallen out. She clutched a small photo album to her chest like it was a shield. Carried flowers with the other.
“I’m Elizabeth, Aurora’s mother,” she said nervously.
I just nodded at her and motioned for her to come closer to the bed. It was surrounded with balloons and flowers. My dad had wanted to tape all the cards on the wall too, but I told him that was a bit much.
Elizabeth walked slowly into the room and sat carefully in the chair beside the bed. The one Mom pulled out and made into a bed every night. She hadn’t left my side. She’d been at the hospital to meet me the moment I arrived.
Elizabeth’s hands trembled as she sat the photo album on her lap. Her eyes were striking. Hazel flecked with green. The red rims betrayed she’d probably been crying in the hallway before she came in.
She sat carefully in the chair beside me and opened the book. Her hands trembled as she turned the pages and showed me pictures of her little girl. Every stage. As a chubby baby, smiling, to her first days of kindergarten, all wide eyed and missing teeth. Elizabeth didn’t spare me the pictures of Aurora when she got sick. Her hair gone from chemo, but a smile so bright it nearly broke me.
“Aurora,” she whispered. “We called her Rory.”
She smoothed a photo with her thumb. “Dawson wasn’t a monster, you know ... not at first. He just broke. He could never get over it. He got hung up on the idea that the treatment would’ve saved her, and when they denied it, that’s all he saw. Rage was the only thing he had left. Really, theonly thing keeping him alive. And it got so scary once he got delusional.”
My throat closed. “I’m so sorry.” And I meant it. For Aurora. For her mother. For all of it.
“The truth is, we don’t know if that treatment would’ve done anything or even made a difference. Nothing else ever did,” she said. Her face wore lines of grief that only someone who’d experienced great loss could possess. “We triedsomany different things. All the traditional treatments, of course. Radiation. Chemo. Trial drugs that left her sicker than the cancer itself. But we also tried everything else too—red light therapy, detoxes, frequency healing. And I clung to hope every single time we tried something else, but nothing made a single bit of difference. She just got sicker and sicker. By the end, she was stage four. That’s terminal. Short of a miracle, she was going to die.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, but I didn’t know what else to say.
