Page 6 of Zane

Should she get in her car and try to trace the route that Zane was likely to take to get home? Unfortunately, she wasn’t thatfamiliar with Tampa yet to know for sure which way he might take to get home. If she was still in Chicago, she wouldn’t be as hesitant.

Still, it was tempting because it meant she’d be doing something and not just sitting around worrying. But what if Zane came home while she was out? Would he think she’d severely overreacted?

Maybe she should call the cops? But would that make him mad?

Or should she call someone in his family? Wouldthatmake him mad?

Besides, what could they do since they were all the way across the country?

And then they’d think she was overreacting, too. It wasn’t the impression she wanted to give them, especially since they apparently already didn’t think too highly of her.

Please, God, help me out.

Appealing to God for help wasn’t something she’d done in a very long time. Mainly because the last time she had, nothing had happened.

Her anxiety faded into the background, and a numbness settled in. She stayed slumped against the balcony railing, immobile because she just didn’t know what to do. Periodically, she checked the tracking program to see if Zane’s phone had come back online.

But there was nothing beyond the last location that had registered, which was coming up on two hours ago. Only two hours? It felt like a lifetime.

What if he’d been in an accident? What if he was…?

“No!” Kelsey spoke the word loudly. She wasn’t going to contemplate that. There was no way she could even let herself consider that the man she loved was anything but alive.

“I need to do something,” she muttered, her gaze back on the parking lot. “I need to do something.”

But still she just sat there, tears blurring her gaze.

She had no one to call to ask what she should do. Being in Tampa meant her support system—small though it had been before they moved—wasn’t there for her. If she and Cheryl had been talking following their fight over Kelsey’s elopement and move to Tampa, she would have called her, regardless of how late it was.

But she was alone, the one person she could count on, nowhere to be found.

The sudden ping of her phone jerked Kelsey out of her stupor, and she blinked rapidly to clear her gaze before looking at her phone. It was a Messenger notification, but she couldn’t see who it was from.

Hoping it was Zane—though that didn’t make much sense—she quickly swiped with a shaking finger to activate the screen. Confusion filled her as she took in the message from Lee, Zane’s brother.

Hi Kelsey ~ Can you call me? I need to talk to you for a minute.

The second message from him contained his phone number. It was all very weird, but it seemed fortuitous that he’d called her when she’d thought about calling one of them. Maybe he’d been trying to contact Zane as well.

She copied the number into a contact and then placed the call, clearing her throat as it rang to make sure she could talk past the tightness of her throat.

“Kelsey?”

“Yes. Yes, it’s me.”

There was a moment of silence before Lee said, “Listen, I have no other way to tell you this but to just say it. Zane’s been in a car accident and is in the hospital.”

“What?” Shock coursed through her, though there wasn’t any surprise, really. She’d known this was a possibility. She just hadn’t thought she’d hear the news from one of her brothers-in-law.

“I got a phone call just a bit ago from the police there in Tampa to let me know what had happened.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, still frozen in place at the railing, her hand tightly gripping the iron railing

“The police found my name as his emergency contact in his wallet, so they called me. I didn’t have your number or address to give them.”

Kelsey dragged herself to her feet. She had to get to Zane.

“How bad is he hurt?”

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