And then he kind of trailed off.

“No, you’re right,” I said sullenly. Resigned to my fate. “Maybe we’ll never swap back.”

Holden bit his lip.

“But maybe we will,” I said. “And if you win Wynonna over while she’s a guy? I’d say you’ve won her over pretty goo—”

Flash.

I was behind the steering wheel of my car.

My car—the Subaru.

My hands were on the steering wheel.

In the mere yoctoseconds that I was processing this startling turn of events, I noticed the bleeding neon of the elevated brake lights in front of me, coming in at literal breakneck force.

I collided with the mountain of a vehicle in front of me, and the hood of the Subaru crumbled like paper beneath the metal beast, and my head smashed into the steering wheel, and—

Black.

SEVEN YEARS AGO

TWENTY-THREE

IT HAPPENED SO FAST, I couldn’t even process it. One second we were driving. The next, I was hanging forward, dangling against the shoulder harness of my seat belt, probably dead. At the very least, my soul felt like it had been jarred from my body.

“Ezra?” said Mom’s voice. She was sitting in the passenger seat, slowly waking up from her own post-impact daze, a pair of airbags slowly deflating. The panic in her tone escalated. “Ezra, honey, are you okay?”

“Uh…” I said, dispelling the theory that I was probably dead.

“Does anything hurt?”

I slowly gave myself a once-over—as if seeing my individual body parts would help me decipher whether or not they were hurting. Mostly, I was shell-shocked, and discombobulated, and didn’t know what was going on.

My forehead hurt a little bit—I was pretty sure it hit the back of dad’s seat—but my seat belt absorbed the brunt of the impact. And anyway, I didn’t want to worry Mom. She looked worried enough.

I shook my head.

That was enough for her. She promptly moved down the line in priority order. Turned to Dad in the driver’s seat.

“Mark?” she said.

Dad seemed awake. And aware. And acutely focused on the car in front of us.

Slowly, Mom turned her head.

The vehicle in front of us—a small white thing—was folded around the nose of our SUV. It looked like an aluminum can that had been stepped on sideways.

The passenger-side window was covered in blood.

It was a shattered spider web of cracks, nothing visible on the inside.

Nothing but blood. I had never seen so much blood. Not even in movies.

Suddenly, Mom was turning back around, smiling wide and slightly manic, blocking my view. “Hey, Ezzie! I’m going to go outside and help these nice people. Your father’s going to come back there and make a phone call, okay? He’s going to call nine-one-one.”

Dad nodded, dazed. He seemed immensely glad that someone else was taking charge here.