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It all happened so fast. Blink-and-you-might-miss-it fast. Did-that-actually-just-happen fast.
But I slammed on the brakes of my rented Prius and pulled to the side, dialing 9-1-1 as I checked on the driver—a man, bloody and incoherent, fading in and out of consciousness.
I stayed with him until help arrived.
I held his blood-covered hand.
I begged him to hang on just a little bit longer …
And when I saw him begin to lose consciousness, begin to let go, I squeezed his hand tighter and rambled on about anything and everything—myself mostly. A ridiculous little one-sided introduction. But I wanted him to focus on my voice.
To cling to the present.
To not succumb.
After all of that, it seemed wrong to head on to the airport, to carry on with my life like nothing happened, so I followed the ambulance to the hospital, and I waited in the waiting room—the scene from the accident replaying in my head over and over and over like a traumatic movie my head refused to turn off.
I couldn’t visit the man, of course, since I wasn’t family. But I stayed at the hospital, waiting until the nurses assured me that his family was there.
I didn’t want him to be alone.
And if he died, I didn’t want him to die alone either … like my twin sister, Kari, five years ago. If only someone had been there when she rolled her Jeep down a steep embankment at one o’clock in the morning, maybe she’d still be here.
To this day, we don’t know if she was distracted or if she’d fallen asleep at the wheel. We also don’t know what would’ve happened had help arrived sooner. The authorities said she’d been gone at least four hours before the sun came up and a passing driver noticed the garish red of her car contrasting against the muted tans of the desert landscape.
I’ve been thinking a lot these last few weeks, about chance and probability, about the likelihood of me being on that stretch of New Jersey interstate at that exact moment, of me camping out in the waiting room and running into an attractive stranger who happened to be visiting from my hometown—a stranger who just so happened to be the best friend of the victim.
“Not long at all.” I lift my martini glass and give him a gracious smile. I don’t tell him that if it were any other night, I’d be putting in a few more hours at the office. I find that sometimes men get put off by a driven woman. If he likes me enough to stick around after the first date, he’ll figure it out on his own anyway. “So sorry it’s taken this long for us to get together. My travel schedule has been crazy.”
“You fly a lot for work?” He flags down a server and orders a beer.
“At least once a month, lately it’s been more often than that. They’ve been sending me to our HQ in Hoboken and sometimes into one of our satellites in Manhattan, which I don’t mind.”
“Grew up in Jersey City,” Grant says. “Not far from there.”
He’s handsome.
More handsome than I remember.
Broad-shouldered. Tall. Dark eyes. Darker hair. Deep-set eyes. Even deeper dimples.
A flash of a smile that plays on his lips when our eyes catch.
I’m no expert in menswear, but I’m willing to wager that his suit cost a pretty penny.
Also, I saw him pull up to the valet stand in a freshly-washed silver Maserati.
Not that any of those things matter.
They don’t.
I do just fine on my own, and material things have never impressed me.
But if a girl’s going to be approached by a stranger and asked on a date, it isn’t the worst thing in the world if he’s dashing, confident, and clearly unafraid to work his ass off for the things he wants.
The last guy I dated was respectably average in all areas, and I was beginning to think about introducing him to my family … but eight dates in, he dropped a bombshell that sent me packing. Not only was he in the middle of a messy divorce, he was living with his mother and paying for our dates with funds from his weekly unemployment checks—which were about to run out (hence the confession).
Crazy enough, he was a step above the guy who came before him—a man who claimed he was a doctor when he was actually a “holistic animal chiropractor” and got bent out of shape when I would refer to him as “Liam” and not as “Dr. Jeppesen” in conversation.
I’d resigned myself to a much-needed dating sabbatical in the months leading up to my chance encounter with Grant.
“What brought you all the way out here?” I ask. Seems like anymore, Phoenix contains more transplants than locals, and everyone has a story. Most of them are along the lines of wanting to trade gray midwestern winters for sunshine and palm trees or ‘just wanting a change,’ but every once in a while, someone throws a curveball of a story my way.
