Page 65 of The Night We Met

Emily starts crying because she is just as scared as I am. I heard the roar of his truck's engine and the honking of horns as I’m assuming he’s speeding past cars.

“Liam please!” I pleaded with him. “I want you in my life. I need you in my life, just not like this!” I tell him. Plead with him to just see reason.

“It’s always up to you. And what you want Kamryn. Well, I’m done thinking about what you want. Doing what you want.” Liam sneered.

“Pull the truck over!” James said at the same time I said, “Liam stop the truck!”

The line was quiet for a minute but then we heard it. The sound of James swearing, the screeching of the tires, the crashing, and the crunching of metal hitting something.

And then nothing.

Nothing moves slower than time. Take a minute on the treadmill. What’s actually thirty seconds feels like onewhole hour. A microwave minute feels like an hour-long lecture class. But in this case time stopped. That moment in TV shows when something monumental happens to one of the main characters and the world moves in warp speed around them, but instead it’s all moving at a normal pace.

Time, in this exact moment, has stopped.

10 seconds.

My phone dropped from my hand.

10 seconds.

I couldn’t move.

10 seconds.

I couldn’t speak.

10 seconds.

I barely registered Emily hysterically crying next to me. And I vaguely hear the sound of Liam’s ringtone and it takes a few seconds for me to move into action.

10 seconds.

I scramble to pick up the phone and answer breathlessly. “Liam?” Hoping with every fiber of my being that it’s him on the other end of the line.

“Uh, no ma’am. This is Officer Lake. I was the first on the scene of the accident. Are you a relative?” he asked me. My mind was a cloud of nothing.

“Uh…um. No. I’m his girlfriend.” I finally respond. A cold sweat spreads over my body.

The officer cleared his throat. “I’m not supposed to do this over the phone. But ma’am your boyfriend was doing twice the posted speed limit. I chased him as much as I could. As soon as I radioed for backup that’s when it happened. We’re transporting both passengers to Covington Memorial Hospital if you want to meet them there. But I will warn you, it doesn’t look too good for them.”

10 seconds.

It was just 10 seconds.

I say nothing in response as I hang up the phone. “Em, they’re being transported to Covington. The officer said it doesn’t look good for either of them.”

10 seconds.

That was all it took for our lives to change forever.

It’s the funny thing about time. It either passes you by in the blink of an eye. Or it draws out to where it’s moving so slowly that you feel like you’ve aged at least five years.

But what about when time ceases to exist? You can’t go back. You can’t magically find the rewind button in hopes that words that already left their mark could be undone.

In this case, time was my enemy. Whatever deity or cosmic God heard my plea just laughed in my face. In this case in time, I had hoped that whatever deity or cosmic God was listening, I hoped that this was some sick and twisted joke.

10 seconds was all it took for me to stop believing in time and the great timing of life.

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