Page 53 of Hidden Shadows
God, everything was a blur.
She scrunched her eyes, trying to pull back flickers of her last memory. Nixon. She’d been fighting with Nixon. And she’d had a sled because they were on the toboggan slope.
Then what?
Her breaths shortened and she was just spiraling into a deep panic when pressure enclosed her fingers. Warmth.
Then his voice.
“You’re safe.”
Immediately, the panic dulled, and even though she lay in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got here, shefeltsafe. Because Nixon was here.
Slowly, she peeled her eyes open. Pain immediately pricked at her skull like tiny stabs of a blade. But she pushed through, needing to see him. Needing answers.
The second her gaze collided with his, air she hadn’t realized she’d been holding rushed from her chest. He looked tired. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, and thick lines sat between his brows.
But he was here.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
The frown deepened, the fingers around her hand tightening. “AmIokay? No, honey. I’m not. Because you’re in a hospital bed.”
She swallowed at the reminder. “I hate hospitals. It reminds me of when my dad got sick.”
His thumb swiped across the back of her hand.
“I visited him as much as I could when he got sick. It wasn’t enough because I was a kid and needed Mom to take me. She didn’t care as much as she should have. And now I associate hospitals with watching him fade away.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
She breathed through the heavy memories. Then she asked the question she needed an answer to. “Why am I here?”
“You don’t remember?”
She shook her head, and pain immediately pinged in her skull.
Nixon saw it. Of course he did. His biceps flexed, fingers tightening around her hand. “Someone crashed into the back of your sled as you were going down the hill. You hit a tree stump, then the fence.”
Little flashes of memory trickled back to her. The collision from behind as she was going down the hill. The inability to turn as the tree stump came into view.
So that was the head pain. “Did anyone see the guy who hit me?” A part of her hoped it was an accident. But the bigger part of her knew that was wishful thinking.
Nixon’s eyes darkened. “No. People were so focused on you, no one saw the guy. We have footage on your phone but can only see the back of him, and it’s not enough to identify him.”
Her lips parted, anger twisting her gut. “I am so sick of this person messing with me! He’s scared me. Threatened me. Stalked me. And I’m over it! I need him caught and for him to leave me the hell alone!”
“You and me both, Fin.” There was the glitter of promise in Nixon’s expression, like he’d personally make sure the man was caught. “But today was your last day at the fair, so at least he can’t target you there anymore.”
“Even if I hadn’t decided that, I wouldn’t go back. Up until this point, I’ve been making excuses. Blaming things on accidents. But I need to stop doing that. It’s him. It’s all him. And I can’t go back and risk anyone else at the fair getting hurt.”
Today, the guy could have pushed her into someone else’s path. She could have hit other people going down the hill, andtheycould have been hurt. God, there had been kids all over the place. If one of them had gotten hurt—
“Hey.”
Nixon’s voice pulled her away from her spiraling thoughts. He cupped her cheek. “Everyone’s okay.”
“But if they weren’t, it would have been my fault.”
