Trillion(80)

My sister would never mislead me—and yet a part of me refuses to believe her.

I lie on my back as the muted fluorescent hall lights pass above me, one after another, alternating with stark white ceiling tiles.

More fucking white.

The instant I close my eyes, her face is the first thing I see—and in full detail, from the starry, Northern-Lights glow of her green eyes to the single freckle on the side of her nose.

Fullness invades my chest and warmth courses through my veins when I imagine her smile.

Maybe I’m dreaming now. Maybe, if I close my eyes one more time, I’ll wake up in our bed, her soft skin hot against mine as she kicks off the covers and laughs in her sleep.

If none of that was real, how do I know she gets teary during happy movies? How do I know she sponsors orphans in Third World countries and donates to no-kill shelters? How do I know her favorite author is Toni Morrison, with Stephen King coming in as an unexpected close second? Her favorite vacation spot is this hole-in-the-wall place we found in Greece on our honeymoon. She glows when she’s pregnant. Pure radiance. And she’s a phenomenal singer, even though she’ll insist she isn’t. Her thick, chocolate-brown hair gets frizzy in the summer and flat in the winter, but she’d be just as gorgeous if she sheared the whole thing off. She chipped her front tooth when she was twelve, though it’s hardly noticeable unless she points it out. She loves Christmas more than a person should. Loves those disgusting hot dogs from the carts on the street, too. She’s seen Chicago on Broadway more than anyone else I know. But more than anything, I know that I’m her whole world. The kids too. We only work when we’re all together. And right now, I’d do anything to get back to them.

And I will.

I’ll do anything.

“All right, Mr. James.” The nurse brings my bed to a halt outside a set of double doors. “We’re here.”

This is all a dream.

No—a nightmare.

It has to be.



CHAPTER THREE



Brie



“I hope you weren’t waiting long. There was a stalled semi on 15.” His name is Grant Forsythe, and I met him in a hospital waiting room in Hoboken a month ago. He noticed my ASU sweatshirt and after a couple of minutes of small talk, we discovered we both live in the Roosevelt Row section of Phoenix, never miss the opening Cardinals game, belong to hiking clubs, and enjoy many of the same dive bars and local musicians.

He’s also the best friend of the man whose life I helped save.

As an actuary and hobbyist statistician, I should be able to calculate the odds of such a chance encounter, but I’m trying not to overthink this. While I’ve never been the girl with the adventurous spirit and a go-anywhere-anytime attitude, something about witnessing a man cling onto his life last month has sparked something in me.

Life is short.

And it can be gone in the blink of an eye—zero warning.

I was on my way to catch a late flight out of Newark when I witnessed the accident happen in real-time—a red Ford truck crossing the interstate median, only to barrel into a black sedan head-on. The truck skidded into the ditch and proceeded to burst into flames, but the sedan came to a rolling stop upside down beneath an overpass. The screech of tires, the burn of rubber, the metallic crunch that followed—I’ll never forget them as long as I live.

It all happened so fast. Blink-and-you-might-miss-it fast. Did-that-actually-just-happen fast.

But I slammed on the brakes of my rented Prius and pulled to the side, dialing 9-1-1 as I checked on the driver—a man, bloody and incoherent, fading in and out of consciousness.

I stayed with him until help arrived.

I held his blood-covered hand.

I begged him to hang on just a little bit longer …

And when I saw him begin to lose consciousness, begin to let go, I squeezed his hand tighter and rambled on about anything and everything—myself mostly. A ridiculous little one-sided introduction. But I wanted him to focus on my voice.

To cling to the present.

To not succumb.

After all of that, it seemed wrong to head on to the airport, to carry on with my life like nothing happened, so I followed the ambulance to the hospital, and I waited in the waiting room—the scene from the accident replaying in my head over and over and over like a traumatic movie my head refused to turn off.

I couldn’t visit the man, of course, since I wasn’t family. But I stayed at the hospital, waiting until the nurses assured me that his family was there.

I didn’t want him to be alone.

And if he died, I didn’t want him to die alone either … like my twin sister, Kari, five years ago. If only someone had been there when she rolled her Jeep down a steep embankment at one o’clock in the morning, maybe she’d still be here.

To this day, we don’t know if she was distracted or if she’d fallen asleep at the wheel. We also don’t know what would’ve happened had help arrived sooner. The authorities said she’d been gone at least four hours before the sun came up and a passing driver noticed the garish red of her car contrasting against the muted tans of the desert landscape.

I’ve been thinking a lot these last few weeks, about chance and probability, about the likelihood of me being on that stretch of New Jersey interstate at that exact moment, of me camping out in the waiting room and running into an attractive stranger who happened to be visiting from my hometown—a stranger who just so happened to be the best friend of the victim.