Second Choice Wife novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Passenger Seat

He locked the bedroom door behind us and stood with his back against it.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap.

For a minute neither of us said anything.

A mockingbird sang in the apple tree outside the window.

"I wasn't driving," Heath said.

I had thought I was ready.

I wasn't.

It went through me, and I put one hand on the quilt to keep the room from tilting.

"Say it all," I said. "From the lake."

He pushed away from the door and sat in the armchair across from me, elbows on his knees.

"It was August. The party at Pike's Landing, two weeks before college. Everyone was there. I'd been drinking since four."

"I was an idiot, I was eighteen, I thought I was something."

"Go on."

"Around eleven I couldn't stand up straight. Bridget said she'd take me home. She said she hadn't had anything but soda."

"Had she?"

"She'd had four vodka lemonades. I found that out later, from a friend. She hid it so well that I believed her."

"She took my keys."

His voice was steady, but his hands were not.

"Quarry Road has no streetlights. She was talking and laughing and crying all at the same time."

"She talked about leaving for Boston, about her father, about us."

"I had my head against the window. I heard her say, Oh God."

"The girl on the road."

"I never saw her. I only felt the truck hit something, and Bridget screamed."

I closed my eyes.

"She stopped the truck. She ran back. She came back and she was shaking so hard she couldn't talk. She called her father."

"Eugene Depew."

"He was a county deputy then. He was on duty four miles away."

Heath rubbed the heel of his hand against his scarred eyebrow.

"He got there before the ambulance."

"He looked at me in the passenger seat. He looked at his daughter. He just told us to move."

"To you?"

"To both of us."

"He pulled her out of the driver's side and shoved me across the bench, and put my hands on the wheel."

"I was too drunk to understand what was happening. I thought he was helping."

I couldn't breathe.

"I remember him leaning in, with a toothpick in his mouth."

"He said it very kindly. Son, you're going to say you were driving."

"If you don't, my girl goes to prison for something that wasn't her fault."

"You've got a lawyer and a name. She's got nothing."

"You were eighteen."

"I was drunk and sick and I had just heard a girl screaming on the road. I said yes."

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