When Doom Found Violet novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: Not Guilt
I sat on the clinic bed with my good hand pressed against my mouth.
A year of dinners went through my head.
Zane's shop hours.
Zane's late deliveries.
Every question he asked had been a hook, and I had swallowed all of them.
"I handed him the schedule," I said. "I gave it to him over meatloaf."
"You didn't know."
"He used me."
"Yes."
"He used me to hit you, Doom."
"No," Doom said. "He used me to hit you."
I looked up.
He hadn't moved from the door, and the muscle in his cheek was jumping.
"He sent a roadblock at me," he said. "He had no way to know your car would be in the intersection. But he put a man in a hurry on that road, and the man was me, and you were the one who got hit."
His voice cracked on the last word.
I had never heard it do that.
"That's why you carried me out," I said. "That's why you pay and you guard and you keep me in your room. You feel guilty."
"Is that what you think?"
"It's what makes sense."
He crossed the clinic in two strides and stopped in front of me.
I had to tip my head all the way back to see him.
"Listen to me," he said.
"I'm listening."
"I ran that light and I hit you, and I'll never forgive it. But I did not carry you out of that car because I was sorry."
His hand came up slowly.
He cupped my jaw, so gently that I stopped breathing.
"I'd have carried you out of a burning house if I'd never hit you in my life," he said. "I'd have done it if I had never learned your name. I looked in that window and I saw a woman hanging by a seat belt, and something in me said she's mine, and I have not been right since."
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