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“Thank you.” I let out a breath as she gathers her things. “Straight home, okay? And don’t come out until it’s tapered off.”
“Okay, Mom,” she says with a laugh, and then the blood leaches from her skin. “Jesus, I’m so sorry. I was just joking and—” She covers her face with her free hand. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Really. Now get the fuck out of here.”
She smiles at me again, shrugging on her jacket, and heads for the door. I go back to the office every bit as tense as I was. What if the roads are already flooded? What if her car stalls out and no one’s around to get her? My throat constricts as if it’s already happened, and I grab my purse.
“I’ve got to run an errand,” I tell Beck, without slowing.
The water in the lot is up to my ankles. How much worse must it be at the low points outside of town where Rachel lives?
The logical part of me knows following her at high speed just to make sure she gets home is insane. But the logical part of me never wins, and it won’t win today either.
I head down Main Street, slowed by the swell of people who’ve decided they better get home. I can barely see out the windows with my wipers on full blast, and just as the light turns green, a cop stops in front of me to halt traffic for a fire truck.
I scream in frustration and the second he gets out of the way, I blow through the light, then turn left onto the road that leads to Rachel and Gus’s neighborhood...only to crest a hill and discover an eight-car pileup in the intersection below.
And one of those cars is Rachel’s.
I pull off to the shoulder of the road and then I slip all the way down the hill, arriving just as she climbs out of her car. “Kate!” she exclaims. “What are you doing here?”
My relief is so sudden and sweet that tears sting. “I was worried you might need help.” I swipe at my eyes. Jesus, I can’t believe I’mcrying. “Are you okay?”
She nods, blinking, placing a hand on the hood of her car as she stares around her. The water is up to our knees. “We need to check on everybody else.”
“Fuck everybody else,” I reply, marching over and linking her arm through mine. She isn’t standing here in the middle of an intersection just waiting for a car to crash into her. “Let’s get away from this mess and call Beck. He’s got the truck today. I promise to check on everyone once you’re out of here.”
“It happened so fast,” she says as I lead her away. “I could have made it, but the car in front of me stopped and then I got rear-ended and...how the hell did you know to come down here?”
“I didn’t.” I guess my paranoia was warranted, but it’s still embarrassing. I reach into my pocket—the phone isn’t there. I must have left it in the car. “Can you call Beck? We need to get you out of here and I don’t trust my tiny car in this mess.”
She hits his number on speed dial.
“Is Kate with you?” he shouts. “I can’t find her and she won’t answer her fucking phone!” His words are so enraged, he barely sounds rational. She raises a brow and hands the cell to me.
“Hi. What’s wrong?” I demand. “I need—”
“I thought you were fucking dead! That’s what’s wrong!”
I hold the phone away from my ear as Rachel and I stare at each other. “Why would you thinkthat?”
“Because I saw you fishtailing in the parking lot and took off after you! I drove all the way back to the house and you weren’t there, and you weren’t answering your phone, and I just heard about some huge pileup north of town. What thefuck?”
“I was checking on Rachel and—”
Rachel’s face goes pale. She grips my arm and stares at the ground.
“Oh God,” she says. “My water just broke.”
* * *
Beckand I sit side by side in the waiting area at Labor and Delivery. Rachel’s emergency focused both of us, but now that it’s over—sort of—he slumps in the chair and leans his head back as if he’s just finished a marathon.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
He releases a slow exhale. “Why would you follow her? What in the hell were you thinking?”
I cross my arms over my chest. “I was worried about her. And it’s a good thing I was, so why are you giving me a bunch of crap about it?”
