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“Cross my heart,” I said as I led her inside.
Ivy took in his home with wide eyes but zero commentary as I carried the pie back to the kitchen and set it on the counter.
I grabbed a pair of mugs from the cabinet. “Milk or sugar?”
Drew’s kitchen was much better stocked than the first morning I’d woken up here, so I had no hesitation in making the offer. I was certain he’d filled the fridge on my account. A softness in my chest pushed away some of my apprehension about facing this day.
“Or delicious calorie-free chemicals?” I shook the little box of yellow sweetener packets that sat next to the coffee maker. These had shown up here on my third day in his house. I hadn’t mentioned my affinity for artificial sweeteners, so I had no idea how he managed to pick the right one.
“Black is fine, thanks.” Ivy’s eyes darted around the kitchen, taking in the lack of seating, no doubt.
I wasn’t taking her to the dining room table we’d defiled. “We can go sit in the front parlor.” I tilted my head toward the kitchen door as I handed her the steaming mug.
She followed me as I led her to a pair of wingback chairs in the small circular room at the front of the house.
“Tell me more about Russ. His birthday is soon?”
“Next month.”
“Do you have pictures?”
She pulled out her phone and proceeded to show me about a hundred pictures of a shaggy-haired blond boy.
“He’s starting Little League this year, and that’s all he can talk about,” she said as she showed me a picture of his room covered in posters of baseball players and various baseball paraphernalia. She let out a long sigh. “He could have started earlier, but I’ve been too afraid to let him do any activity where he could get hurt. After everything we’ve been through… I read about these freak accidents where kids get hit in the head or the chest with a ball and—” She pulled her sleeve over her thumb and wiped it under her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, you never have to apologize for worrying about your child,” I reassured her. I gave her a moment to compose herself. “But you’ll have to excuse my ignorance because Drew isn’t the most open of books and no one in this town dares speak a word to me about him besides telling me what he can’t do.” I stopped to soften the edge from my tone. “So you’ll have to explain to me what happened with Russ when Drew saved him.”
“Of course,” she said, her posture stiff. “You wouldn’t know the details.”
Realization settled over me and a small spike of adrenaline sent my blood pumping. Maybe it wasn’t right for me to hear this from her. I’d been holding out hope Drew would eventually open up to me about how he’d lost his leg. But even if he didn’t, it didn’t matter. That was only one piece of his story. It didn’t define who he was.
As much as I’d been frustrated with everyone for acting so secretive about it, now that I faced the possibility of someone besides Drew telling me about it, it didn’t feel right.
“No one in this town ever breathes a word about it.” She pushed on. “It was five years ago today that—”
“Today?” I interrupted her. The sheer cosmic coincidence of our shared anniversary knocked the wind out of me. “April thirteenth?”
She nodded and gave me a questioning look.
“Sorry, go ahead.”
“Russ’s father had bailed on us six months earlier, and I worked a ton of double shifts to keep up with the bills. My dad was watching Russ. He helped out a lot back then, but his memory was starting to go. Only little things at first. Having to search a little longer for his keys, then it would turn out they were in his pocket the whole time. Stuff like that. The doctors said there was no way I could have predicted he’d have an episode, but I still feel like I should have known.”
“Episode?”
She took a fortifying breath. “He was watching Russ while I was working an overnight shift, but he got confused in the middle of the night. Russ was supposed to stay the night, and I was going to pick him up the next morning. My dad woke up sometime after midnight, but he thought it was early evening and that he needed to bring Russ home after dinner. I guess he thought Russ was taking a nap or something. He woke him up, made him mac and cheese, and loaded him into the car. Apparently, because my dad thought it was dinnertime, he also took his insulin. But he didn’t eat anything. Then while he was driving to my place, they think he had a hypoglycemic episode and lost consciousness behind the wheel.”
“Jesus,” I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, “that’s awful.”
Her right hand worried a loose upholstery thread on the arm of the chair. “He passed out as they approached a train crossing and that’s where the car rolled to a stop. On the tracks. I live outside town, ‘out in the sticks,’ as my dad liked to call it. The likelihood of someone finding them out there at three in the morning was slim to none.”
A chill ran through me, the weight of so many unlikely odds pressing me into my chair. “But it happened?”
“Drew found my dad’s car sitting on the tracks with him unconscious at the wheel and my son screaming bloody murder from the back seat. Who knows how long they were sitting there before Drew found them.”
“It’s incredibly lucky that he did.” My stomach pulled tight as I waited for her to get to the inevitable part of her story.
She nodded and wiped at her eyes again. “When Drew got there, the arms started coming down at the crossing. He couldn’t push the car off the tracks, so he had to get them out. The train…”
