We’ll come get the Volvo this weekend.

I wonder what ever happened to it.

Dad kept one giant hand on the steering wheel and the other curled around my fingers.

He glanced at me every five seconds or so, no doubt wishing he had Mom’s list right there on the dashboard, to reference the The first time a boy breaks her heart . . . advice. I knew where to find it. Number thirty-two.

His eyes were worried, brows drawn . . . As much as I hated what had happened with Elliot, I loved the warmth of Dad’s attention on me, the reassuring contact of his hand, the quiet questions—what did I want for dinner? Did I want to go to a movie, or stay home?

But his attention on me meant it wasn’t on the road.

I’m not even sure he ever saw the car. It was a blue Corvette, merging from the onramp and already going too fast. Sixty, maybe even seventy. It cut in front of us in the slow lane, screeching into the narrowing space between us and the eighteen-wheeler ahead. The Corvette’s tires skittered, his back end jerked to the side, and his brake lights went a brilliant red, right there. Right in front of us.

Was there a point when it wasn’t too late? This is what I always asked myself. Could I have communicated something more than a garbled “Dad!” and a pointed finger?

Witnesses told police they thought the whole thing happened in fewer than five seconds, but it would forever happen in slow motion in my memory: I still feel Dad’s worried eyes on me, not the Corvette. This was why he didn’t even touch his brakes. We came on it so fast, with a deafening clash of metal, and our bodies jerked forward, airbags burst out, and I thought for a fraction of a second that it was okay. The impact was over.

Except we hadn’t landed yet. When we did, it was a bruising of the driver’s side against asphalt, a screaming twenty feet of sparking metal. We came to a stop on our sides. My forehead ended up near the steering wheel. My seat had crushed Dad’s, with him still in it.

Later, I’d find out that the other driver was a student from Santa Rosa Junior College. His name was Curt Anderssen, and he walked away with a slight abrasion to his neck. Not from the seat belt—he wasn’t even wearing one—but from the fabric of the passenger seat, where he was launched when his car spun sideways through three lanes of traffic.

Curt was unconscious at first, I think, and most of the activity focused on the far more gruesome reality of our car. I was already on the stretcher with a broken arm when Curt emerged, stoned out of his mind and laughing at his survival, until he was shocked into sobriety by the scene before him and the police with their handcuffs.