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“You can’t walk, Bethany. It’s too far.”
“It’s only four miles, Mom. I think I can handle it.” My typical day in NYC covered way more ground than a measly four miles.
“There aren’t any sidewalks from here to Main Street. This isn’t the city, you know. I don’t want to get a call that you’re lying in a ditch somewhere because someone ran you off the road.”
That also did not appeal.
“Fine,” I relented. “I’ll take the car.”
It turned out that a car could end up in a ditch just as easily as a person.
“Well,” Ethan said, after he had towed me out with his SUV, “it still runs.”
I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. The cracked leather bit into my skin but I didn’t back away from the pain. It was what I deserved as the world’s worst daughter. Yes, it still ran, but now there was a dent in the passenger side of my mom’s Subaru. The car was thirteen years old, but it had somehow managed to avoid the dings and dents of small-town life—until today.
I groaned softly.
I had gotten myself safely to the community center, spent an hour going over theNutcrackerplans with Emma, and was on my way home again when it happened.
Hart’s Ridge drivers, I had discovered, preferred to drive fast. Hard to say if it was above the speed limit because I never saw one posted. They also liked to drive right down the center of the unmarked gravel road that led from the town center out to the farms instead of treating it like a two-lane highway. I had accordingly taken to driving as close to the ditch as I safely could, my eyes glued to the middle of the road, praying another truck wouldn’t come barreling down on me.
Which meant I never saw the deer coming, leaping out of the woods over the ditch and heading straight for me.
“Good thing you took the ditch,” Ethan said. “It would have been worse if you hit the deer.”
I shuddered. “Yeah, I wouldn’t have wanted to kill Bambi.”
“I meant for your car. The ditch isn’t that deep. You know what a deer weighs? Two hundred pounds. That does a lot of damage.” When I gave him a horrified look, he shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
“Yeah? Well, just don’t,” I snapped.
He walked around the hood of the car to the other side to fully assess the damage. “It’s not so bad. You couldn’t have been going more than forty when it happened. The airbag didn’t go off.”
“It was thirty.”
He snorted. “And you call me old. You’re out here driving like a blind granny.”
“I shouldn’t have been driving at all. No one drives in New York! It’s a miracle I remembered where the gas pedal is.” I groaned again. “Shit, Ethan. What am I going to do?”
“Well,” Ethan said meditatively, “Fix it. Or don’t.”
“Gee, thanks.” My voice dripped with sarcasm. “I hadn’t realized those were my options.”
“You asked.”
“And you answered. Unhelpfully.”
He grinned. “I’m glad you’re back, Princess. I missed you.”
I stuck out my tongue. Ethan had coined the nickname back when I was nine, dancing the part of a snowflake in theNutcracker, because I looked like a princess in my pale blue netted skirt, with rhinestones in my hair. Back then, he said it because he was sweet. As we grew older, he mostly used the nickname when I was being bratty.
“I missed you, too,” I said.
It was true. I had friends in the ballet, but there was always an undercurrent of tension between us. Dancers in the New York Ballet Company were at the top of their game, yet still competing for plum roles. With Ethan, there was no rivalry mixed in with our friendship.
“How is Robin?” he asked. He squatted by the dent, examining the damage like he was more concerned with my car than my answer.
But I knew better. Robin was a soloist with the New York Ballet Company. I had introduced them two years ago and they had hit it off.
