Chapter 3: Chance Encounter

Harper's POV

Those were the longest ten seconds of my life.

If I had killed him with that one blow, my twenty-eight years would end on that stretch of highway. I would become the woman who ran somebody down in a rainstorm, and the ladies of the women's auxiliary would be talking about me and my mother on the church steps all winter long. My stomach turned over at the thought, and I shoved the car door open and was sick.

The rain soaked me through at once. I kicked off my heels and walked onto the gravel barefoot, one step at a time.

He was face-down, his soaked suit plastered to his back, blood seeping out from beneath his head and spreading across the asphalt in a pale wash of pink that was still widening.

"Hey." I crouched down, my voice shaking past all recognition. "Can you hear me?"

He didn't move. I pushed at his shoulder, pulled my hand back the second it touched the wet fabric, then reached out again and pushed harder. His body rolled over with the force of it.

I pressed my fingers to the side of his neck and let out a breath. He had a pulse — faint, fast, like a small bird flinging itself against thin skin.

I got through to 911 immediately and stood there stamping my feet at the hold tone.

"Hello—"

"Hello, I hit somebody! On Route 17. Can you get an ambulance out here fast?"

"Is the injured party critical? Where is he hurt? Is he conscious?"

"He's hurt all over! I don't know — he's already passed out."

"All right. I've dispatched one."

After the call ended, I finally breathed. I looked at the man lying in the rain, dug an umbrella and a blanket out of the car, I had just started to lay the blanket across him when I heard gunshots somewhere in the distance.

Why would there be shooting out here?

Before I could get anywhere near an answer, two more shots followed. My body shook and I couldn't stop it, and I hurriedly folded the umbrella and gathered the blanket back up.

I got him under both arms and started hauling him toward the car, his shoes scraping the gravel, and my mouth ran without permission, because it was the only thing holding me together.

"I'm sorry — I can't wait for the ambulance. Hold on, I'm taking you to the hospital myself."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"God, please let him live."

Getting a man that size into the passenger seat nearly finished me. The seatbelt caught on the second try. Blood had run from his temple all the way down his cheek and dried across most of his face.

I drove with my head turned half the time, watching whether his chest was still moving. I didn't dare speed up, though — if I hit somebody else tonight, I was done for.

I turned the radio on. I wanted another sound in the car, anything to cut the terrible quiet of that rain.

"...the county sheriff's office has confirmed receiving a report at around nine o'clock tonight. Multiple shots were heard near an abandoned dock about eight miles north of Route 17. Deputies arriving on scene found blood on the ground, a number of shell casings, and an abandoned dark-colored sedan with no one inside. No injured persons have been located as of this time. Police say they have not ruled out that someone left the scene after being shot, and declined to release further details. The investigation is ongoing..."

My hands loosened on the wheel, then tightened again.

Eight miles. Eight miles north. I had picked him up heading south, and that's no small distance — but could he have come out of that?

The moment the thought surfaced, I pushed it back down. Being caught up in a shooting was no better than a car accident.

Still, I turned and looked at him. His head rested against the window, hair stuck to his forehead, no gauze yet, blood running from his temple down to his jaw, the small patch it had soaked into on the seatbelt already spread wide. He moved suddenly — a faint sound, not quite conscious — and his eyes didn't open.

"Please hold on," I said. "We're almost at the hospital."

The fluorescent lights of the county hospital's emergency room bleached every face to the same color. When they wheeled him in, I followed barefoot, the soles of my feet cut all over from the gravel, leaving a red print with every step, and I felt none of it.

The nurse spread a registration form out in front of me. Name, date of birth, insurance, emergency contact. I held the pen and couldn't write a single word.

"What's his name?"

"I don't know," I said. "I pulled him off the road. I hit him."

She gave me a look — the kind that has seen every version of this and carries nothing in it — and lifted her hands off the keyboard.

"Per protocol, an unidentified person injured in a traffic incident has to be reported to the police."

I watched her pick up the phone, say something brief into it, and set it back down.

"The sheriff's office is sending someone. Please wait in the seating area. The doctor will give him emergency treatment."

I sat in that plastic chair for twenty minutes, mud on my heels, my dress dripping onto the floor, shivering hard enough that my teeth knocked together. My mind had stopped producing anything at all. I just sat there and watched the time pass in front of me.

I don't know how long it was before the deputy arrived with two others, both younger than me. They started in on whether I'd been drinking, whether I was clear-headed, and I don't know how many times I repeated my answers, until the doctor came over and cut us off — the man behind the curtain was awake.

I went with the deputy and stood outside the partition.

The man was half-sitting on the exam table, his color bad, gauze taped to his temple, and none of it could hide how good-looking he was: a straight nose, full lips, and eyes as clear and wet as a dog's. Seeing him in that state made him all the more pitiful, and brought up in me a guilt I had no claim to.

He only shook his head at the deputy's questions, again and again.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"I don't know," he said, his voice dry as sandpaper.

The questioning ended without getting anywhere. The deputy called the doctor over.

The doctor clipped the scans to the light box and walked us through them. "A fall couldn't produce injuries like these. These came from behind. At least two points of impact, and another one here. The only thing caused by the collision is subcutaneous bruising on the leg."

"The head wounds look serious, but they're small. That's why you can see he's lost his memory yet came around so quickly. Watch him for a while, and if nothing develops he can be discharged — though with the amnesia, and being unfamiliar with his surroundings, he may need someone to help him."

The deputy turned to me, and something in his look had loosened. "So your part of this," he said, "didn't do the real damage."

"I didn't hit him?"

"You clipped one leg." He closed his notepad. "Everything on his head was done before you got there. Best we can tell, you're the one who picked him up off the road."

When I heard that, the strength went out of me from the neck down — that softness that runs from your nape to your calves — and I had to hold on to the curtain to stay upright. Then the relief was overtaken by something else: how does a man come to be hurt this badly?

I never got the chance to learn more. The deputy finished his questions, slid the notepad into his breast pocket, and looked at me.

"You can go. Come in tomorrow if you want to file a written statement — after that this has nothing to do with you."

Then he turned toward the other side of the curtain. "Sir, if the doctor's cleared you, come with us. You've got nowhere to go anyway — we'll run you against the missing persons list and verify your identity."

No ID, no one coming for him, no one to speak on his behalf. Procedure allowed for nothing else.

I looked at the man on the bed without meaning to.

He sat very straight, and even wrecked as he was, he looked something like a prince, thanking the nurse who handed him a blanket. Then he lifted his head and looked around toward the curtain — and what rose in me then was a tenderness close to pain.

The loneliness coming off him was the same loneliness I had felt at my own engagement party tonight.

"Can't he stay at the hospital?" I asked.

"The hospital can give him emergency treatment, but once he meets discharge criteria they can't keep him." The deputy's voice was level. "We have a holding room. He can wait there while we find out who he is, and then we find somebody to take him."

Before my brain caught up, the words were already out of my mouth. "Can I take him home with me?"