Page 1 of Born to Run Back
Prologue
Thirty-Seven Minutes
Wendy
HaciendaRoad,PuenteHills,2:30 a.m., October
The windshield wipers cleared the slick of late October rain as I navigated the canyon route, their steady rhythm the only sound in the drowning darkness. Driving back from Riverside, my mind was still caught between quarterly projections and the half-finished painting hanging in my apartment.
Blues. Grays. Aching emptiness. And something else I could not yet identify.
The curve of the road ahead straightened, and though I would not know it then, my entire existence was about to hang by a thread, defined by thirty-seven minutes which would change me—forever.
Sometimes, on mysterious and stormy nights like these, when no one could afford to notice, time slowed. Halted, stuttering in my chest like a skipped heartbeat.
Because Ididnotice. I always noticed.
There was silver, gleaming in the brilliant haze of rain-drizzled moonlight. Metal collapsed against earth where the guardrail should have been. Steam rose from the overturned sports car like breath in frigid winter air. My Honda skidded as I braked,hard, tires squealing against wet asphalt. A white BMW ahead lay upside down in the ravine, its headlights pointing skyward, as if summoning the heavens for help.
For a moment, I gripped the steering wheel. So tight, my knuckles became white as bone. Then I was out, flinging the car door open as my pantsuitswished, my heels clicking on the pavement before I could stop to think. I half-sprinted down the embankment, phone already pressed to my right ear.
“There’s been an accident on Hacienda Road, mile marker—” I looked around, not realizing yet how these numbers would haunt me. “—eighteen. Single vehicle rollover. Send help fast, please.”
The dispatcher’s voice seemed very far away, as if they were in another realm altogether. I felt as if we were underwater, too deep in the abyss for help to reach us in time. I knelt beside the passenger window, peering through the spiderweb of cracked glass. A face materialized, younger than me by at least a decade, maybe more. Early twenties perhaps, or even a teenager, and—terrified. Eyes wide, blood trickling from her forehead.
“You’re going to be okay,” I heard myself say to her, though I didn’t entirely know if it was true. “Help is coming. Can you tell me your name?”
“D-Delaney.” The word came out broken, as if slaughtered on its way out of her throat. “Beck. Is he okay?”
Before I could peer into the driver’s side, I heard footsteps splashing through the puddles behind me.
Theo
Insomnia claimed me, wrapping itself like a silk noose around my neck. I had tried to chase away the restlessness that clung to me, driving these canyon roads for over an hour now. The curves of the road demanded attention, and attention was kind of what I required in these moments. Something to pull my mind away from the never-ending stack of ungraded papers on my kitchen table, from the ache of something I wasn’t ready to name seared into my chest.
And the phone call from my sister I kept avoiding.
When I saw the brake lights, the abandoned dark gray Honda Civic on the shoulder up ahead,everythingchanged.
I found myself slamming on my brakes, pulling over and grabbing the first aid kit from my trunk as the rain splattered all over me. Scaling down the ravine, I could see the figure of a thin rail of a woman in the dark, clad in a drenched pantsuit that seemed almost glued to her skin. She looked up as I approached, and even in the dim moonlight, I could see something in her expression that drove me to move faster.
“I have some medical training,” I said, kneeling beside the driver’s door. My eyes scanned through the broken window, at the young man gasping for breath, his skin a sickly, alarming shade of white. I wrenched the car door open.
The woman nodded, her dark eyes conveying her unease. “The girl’s conscious but hurt. I don’t know about the driver. I-I can’t see him through the broken glass.”
I was already checking for a pulse, assessing the angle of the guy’s neck. Beck, the young woman in the passenger seat kept calling him. Mid-twenties, the kind of face that belonged to a golden hour, made to be caught in fading, honey-warm light—notthis. He was breathing, but I could hear something wrong in the sound, something that made my chest tighten.
In the distance, sirens began to wail.
Wendy
Despair swirled in the air as the driver’s labored breathing, his groans of agony, filled the emptiness, the great big silence of the canyons I’d grown to love since moving out west. A city girl, a girl who’d walked to school in the shade of New York City skyscrapers—and now here, in this town where nobody ever understood the feeling of smog rising from the vents, of eating a hotdog on the street during a heatwave, of crowds and noise and bumper-to-bumper round-the-clock traffic and... everything. So much of everything.
And now? Now there was a whole bunch of nothing.
I kind of loved it, even if it meant I barely knew a soul outside of coworkers and clients. The loneliness had become a part of me, ingrained in my personality, a thing of no mystery, no guesswork required.
Here lies Wendy Martin. She was lonely. That’s what my tombstone would say. And it would be enough to describe me. More than enough.
