RUINED FOR HER

Margot POV

The world flipped before I understood what was happening.

One second I was gripping the wheel, laughing at something Sabine said. The next, the guardrail was above me instead of beside me, and the sky and the road had traded places.

Metal screamed. Glass rained down on my arms. My body slammed sideways so hard my teeth cut into my tongue, and the taste of blood filled my mouth before the car even stopped rolling.

Then everything went still.

Too still.

"Margot." Sabine's voice cracked through the silence, high and broken. "Margot, I can't feel my legs. Margot, why can't I feel my legs?"

I turned my head. Pain shot through my neck like a knife twisting slowly. Sabine was upside down beside me, still strapped in, her face white as paper, her hands clawing at her own thighs like she was trying to wake them up.

"I'm here." My voice came out shaking. "I'm right here, Sabine. Don't move."

"I can't move! That's what I'm telling you, I can't." Her scream cut off into sobbing, and I hated how useless I felt, hanging upside down in a seatbelt, unable to reach her, unable to fix the one thing she needed fixed.

I fumbled for the buckle at my hip. My fingers wouldn't cooperate. They felt far away, like they belonged to someone else.

"Help is coming," I told her, because it was the only thing I could think to say. "Somebody saw us go over. Somebody had to have seen us."

I didn't know if that was true. I said it anyway.

Sabine's sobbing softened into shaking breaths. I finally got my belt loose and dropped hard onto what used to be the roof, pain exploding through my shoulder. I crawled toward her over broken glass, ignoring the sting in my palms, and grabbed her hand through the gap between the seats.

"Look at me," I said. "Look at me, not your legs."

She looked at me. Her eyes were wide and terrified, but she looked at me, and for one second it felt like when we were kids, when she used to grab my hand during thunderstorms, and I'd tell her the noise couldn't reach her if she wasn't looking at the window.

That was the only thing I did right that whole night.

Sirens came a few minutes later, or maybe it was longer; time didn't feel real anymore. Hands pulled me out through a broken window. Someone wrapped a blanket around my shoulders even though I wasn't cold. I kept twisting back toward the car, trying to see them cut Sabine free, trying to make sure they were being careful, and a paramedic kept saying my name as she needed me to focus on her instead.

I didn't focus on her.

I focused on the sound Sabine made when they lifted her onto the stretcher. It wasn't a scream. It was worse than a scream. It was silence where a scream should have been, because for the first time, some part of her already understood.

At the hospital, they put me in a room by myself and told me to wait. Wait for what, nobody said. My hands wouldn't stop shaking even after the shaking should have stopped. I kept replaying the drive in my head, over and over, trying to find the moment where I could have done something different.

We were only going to the overlook because Sabine wanted a photo with the coastline behind her. She'd begged me to switch seats with her right before we left, said she looked better on the driver's side in the lighting, that it wouldn't matter since it was such a short drive. I remember laughing at how ridiculous that sounded and doing it anyway, because that's what I always did. Sabine asked. I said yes. That was the whole shape of our whole lives.

If I hadn't switched seats, would it have been her hitting the brakes instead of me?

Would it have been me lying in that hospital bed instead, and her sitting here shaking?

I didn't let myself finish that thought.

A doctor finally came to update me. He used careful words, the kind doctors use when they don't want to say the real thing directly. Spinal injury. Significant damage. Paralysis, likely permanent, though they wouldn't know for certain for weeks.

I heard the words land somewhere far away from me, as they belonged to somebody else's sister.

"Can I see her?" My voice barely worked.

"Not yet. She's stable, but she needs rest." The doctor hesitated, glancing at the door like he wasn't sure how to say the next part. "Her fiancé is here. He's asking to speak with the driver."

The driver.

Not my name. The driver. Like I had stopped being a person the second the car went over the rail.

I already knew who was standing outside that door before it opened, because there was only one person in the world Sabine called her fiancé, and only one person whose face could make my chest tighten even now, even with everything falling apart around me.

Griffin.

I hadn't seen him in almost a year, not since the engagement party where Sabine had glowed under the chandelier light and he'd looked at her the way people look at something they can't believe they get to keep. I remembered thinking that night that I understood exactly why. I remembered a version of myself that had once, foolishly, quietly, wished someone would look at me that way instead.

I pushed that memory down hard. It didn't belong here. Not tonight.

The door opened. Griffin stood there, and the second his eyes found mine, something in his face went cold in a way I had never seen before, not once, not in all the years I'd known him.

"What happened?" he said. Not a question. An accusation already halfway formed.

I opened my mouth to answer him, to explain the guardrail, the spin, the sickening silence after, and that was the exact moment my brain finally caught up to something it had been trying to tell me since the second the car left the road.

The brakes.

I had pressed them. I remembered pressing them, hard, both feet, bracing for the pull and the screech that always came when you slammed the brakes at speed.

There had been no screech.

There had been no sound at all.

The brakes hadn't failed loudly, the way brakes are supposed to fail. They hadn't failed at all.

They had simply not been there.