Then Hunt’s hand slid beneath her palm and she remembered that. She was willing her fingers to curl around it, but they would not.

She heard his voice, but she could no longer see him.

Hunt! Hunt! Don’t turn me loose. I don’t know how to find my way back yet. Just don’t let me go.

* * *

Good or bad, news always spread fast in Blessings, and this was no exception. Within hours, everyone knew about the Ryman boy trying to elope with the Dillon girl, and about Pete Dillon, the girl’s daddy, chasing them down and wrecking all of them on the two-mile bridge north of town.

Everybody knew about the family brawl that had ensued in the ER after the victims were brought in from the wreck. They knew the Dillon girl had been hurt the worst, and that she’d lost the baby she was carrying, and after that her heart had stopped two times. People said it was because her soul didn’t want to give her baby up. They said it was a mother’s instinct to stay with her child, but that she was finally stabilized enough to take to surgery.

They knew the Dillon boy had a broken arm and a concussion, and that Pete Dillon was released with nothing more than a broken nose.

But it was what Josh Ryman did to Ava Ridley that sent shock and disbelief throughout the community.

It was all over town, and the gossip was spreading.

They said Josh Ryman hit Ava so hard it stopped her heart.

They said she dropped dead on the hospital floor.

And that’s when the storylines began straying from the truth.

According to some stories, Ava’s fiancé, Hunt Knox, had waded through the brawl, laying Dillons and Rymans on the floor to get to her. The fact that there was only one Dillon and one Ryman fighting each other didn’t matter. The story sounded better their way.

The story continued with Hunt and a nurse doing CPR for nearly an hour (although it was barely four minutes) until the only defibrillator in the hospital was freed up to shock Ava’s heart back into a normal rhythm.

They knew she was alive now, but they were grieving that she still had not regained consciousness. So the next step in Blessings when things went wrong was to either feed people or pray for them. And since food wouldn’t help, prayer vigils were starting up all over town.

Emma updated her brothers and sister that evening, telling all of them what had happened. It was a mutual decision when the Knox siblings all gathered together and made a beeline to the hospital.

* * *