An indescribable pain in her side. She was whisked off her feet. And then her forehead crunched against something sharp and spiky. She felt her forehead glisten with running liquid.

And then she was flung. The world turned over like she was in a washing machine. Over and over and over and over. It was as if she was spiraling forever—and she wondered what was happening. What had hit her? And what was she doing? Where was she? Who was she? There was only one constant—the face of a kind and sheepish man, with dots of stubble and electric eyes, who had once come up to her at a party and asked her to dance. His name was—

The ground—which somehow was above her—came to meet her. And the last thing she heard was a phenomenal crunch before the pain sent her under.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Three years earlier...

They sat there, not believing what had just happened. It couldn’t have, right? This was fantasy. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. Things like this didn’t happen to them. Edmund was visibly shaking, and gagging on his tongue. Tim sat as still as he ever had in the passenger seat, shaken. In the back seat, Pru had buried herself in Rachel’s shoulder, silently sobbing. Robert was speechless and had closed his eyes as if that would help.

The windshield was smeared with blood.

They sat there, staring out of the cracked windshield, seeing only the ground in the path of the car headlights. All of their thoughts were muddled, indecipherable—but the one thing they were all thinking—“I hope it was a deer.”

“Oh God.” Pru gave a muffled wail into Rachel’s shoulder.

They had all sobered up in an instant. They had never felt less drunk.

“It was an animal. Don’t worry,” Tim said. “It was an animal, right?” To Edmund.

Edmund didn’t respond. He just kept looking ahead. He knew it wasn’t an animal. He was going too fast. He had just wanted to get home, go to sleep, carry on his life. He wanted to go to university, find a girl, get married, have kids. And now all that was gone. Because he had been going about twenty miles an hour too fast. And he hadn’t seen her. She had pretty much been invisible—no light, no sound, no sense she was there. She hadn’t even screamed when he’d hit her. She was mute, and now she had landed behind the car, ten or twenty feet behind them. And it was his fault.

His future evaporated in front of his eyes. He almost reached out for it, trying to grab it, but it disappeared like breath on a mirror.

“Holy shit, Ed,” Robert said, opening his eyes. He sounded smaller than he ever had. “What the hell have you done?”