Page 106 of Tipping Point

“Can I elaborate on why I lied when you asked me if I was okay? Unfortunately, no.”

Grace’s machinery sounds overwhelmingly loud in the room’s silence as everyone takes me in with curious eyes.

Hope stirs in her seat and picks off imaginary lint from her jeans, folding her hands neatly in her lap. I couldn’t believe when she agreed to it. To this interview. Because in my mind, for all these years, she had nothing but hate for me.

I had phoned her personally and we talked, casually, tentatively feeling each other out. it was cordial and courteous. Already the thought had formed that Cam would love this, love to see this. Would only believe it if she saw it with her own eyes…

And then I just threw it out there, and she agreed. “Because,”she explained, “I’m sure there are others just like me out there.”

So selfless. My opposite.

“Can you take us through what happened that day?” Cam tears her eyes away from mine, looking at the monitor in front of her instead.

It is so very important that I don’t lie.

And not just because Camille will know the instant I do. But because Hope is giving me a second chance at life, and for me to grasp it, to find the courage to live it, first, I need to shed this old one. I am hoping that by doing this I will somehow be able to accept the possibility of life. Of living.

“Stanley Everton,” I say, and I grin. Scoff.

“It had been my lifelong dream to be as good as Stanley Everton, and that day, it was my first chance to actually beat him.”

You could hear a pin drop. Their eyes are riveted to me, all except Camille, who filters me through the screen of the monitor. She doesn’t push, letting torturously long silences pool between my sentences.

“I was pushing it,” I admit. I swallow down a rock of guilt climbing up my throat. “Felix grounded me, reeled me in. I slowed down.”

I turn to Hope. Her green eyes are large as emeralds as she takes me in. She’s never heard my side, I realize. It’s important to me that she knows this minor detail.

“I was slowing down,” I repeat, and she gives a small nod of acknowledgement. “But it was too late.”

Her green eyes grow darker. She gives me another small nod.

We turn back towards the cameras. I look down into the black void of the lens.

“It was either the tyres or debris on the track. Either way, I lost control.”

Silence pools. I swallow hard.

“We’re always taught to turn into a skid. It’s instinct. I had this thought that I needed to get the car turned, to hit the barrier on the side. If you hit it head on, it’s so much more dangerous. All that energy in such a small area.”

The even cadence of Grace’s machine grounds me. I take a moment to get my breathing under control.

“I turned the car, but it was a mistake. The wheels caught on the curb, just a micro ridge, but at that speed…It vaulted the car into the air.”

I blink away the shrieking tear of the chain-link fence when I hurtled through it. The silence stretches out then. Long and fragile, a living thing.

Hope puts her hand over mine.

When I force myself to look at her, she’s crying, quiet tears down her face.

“The sound…” I whisper. I can’t say it. What it had sounded like, hitting human bodies.

“I remember,” she whispers back.

“I undid my harness. People pulled me from the car. It was already burning. Fuel everywhere, ignited.”

Hope nods.

“A child was crying?” My gaze flits between her eyes.

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