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“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”
She couldn’t panic.
Wouldn’t.
The vision was nothing. Nothing!
But her insides were trembling and she knew that she had to leave, to find her way home, and fast. That was it. She would throw some water over her face, figure out what she was going to do, how she would care for the baby, if she would ever tell Hudson, what she would tell her parents…
Gingerly she stepped on the gas.
The road was empty and she could have sworn that the harsh winds that had just been battering the car had died. No birds called, no insects hummed, no sounds of distant traffic reached her ears. Even the car’s engine was muted. Still.
And then she heard it.
An engine.
Loud.
Rumbling.
A truck of some sort, traveling fast, coming from around the bend behind her. She didn’t dare accelerate onto the pavement until it passed. And yet…
Her heart was a tattoo, her palms wet. Something was wrong. Seriously wrong!
It’s the vision. It’s got you all hyped up. That’s all.
The engine roared more loudly.
And then a dark pickup careened around the corner at breakneck speed, its wheels nearly coming off the pavement.
“No!” she cried as the driver apparently lost control.
In a split second, the truck bore down on her, its huge grate magnified in her mirror.
She stepped on the gas, but it was too late.
The truck careened off the pavement.
She screamed. The pickup slammed into her car, nearly broadside, crumpling the back end and door of the Toyota. With a horrible shriek, the metal wrenched. Glass shattered. The driver’s door was wrenched from its hinges as the car folded. Pain screamed through her body as she saw the truck tear away, hardly slowing at all. The vision returned…a dark angry sea, a large looming form, and a deadly threat as she went in and out of consciousness.
There had been policemen and EMTs and gawkers as the car had been opened with the Jaws of Life and she’d been extracted from the wreckage. People had shouted or whispered or talked into walkie-talkies, but it was all a blur as she was carried into a waiting ambulance.
Please let me keep my baby, she prayed to the ceiling of the ambulance as the siren screamed, resounding. Please. Please!
She’d woken up in the hospital, her parents worn and raw, her mother’s eyes red-rimmed and teary as she sat in a bedside chair, a wadded tissue in her fingers. Her father, appearing to have aged a decade in the past ten hours, stood near his wife’s chair, a big steadying hand on Barbara’s shoulders.
“The baby?” she asked in a voice that sounded a million miles away. She felt empty inside, oddly at war with her own body as an IV leaked fluids into her wrist, and outside the private room, through a door slightly ajar, she saw a large, curved desk-the nurses’ station.
Her parents had looked at her and shaken their heads. Tears leaked from her mother’s eyes and her father’s lips pressed flat together.
Her prayers had gone unanswered and a somber-faced doctor only a few years older than she had explained that the force of the accident had caused her placenta to rupture. The baby could not be saved and Becca was “lucky” to have only sustained a broken clavicle, bruised ribs, and facial contusions from the flying glass.
Lucky? When my baby died?
Despair coiled over her heart. Becca’s parents took care of their distraught daughter, who refused to tell them the baby’s father’s name, though surely they could have guessed. She’d never introduced Hudson as her “boyfriend,” had usually gone out with a crowd that included several boys, as far as her mother and father were concerned, but surely they could guess.
They just never asked after the first initial weeks.
