Chapter 10: Fifty-Two Minutes

Nolan's POV

I sat in my car outside her building for twenty minutes after the Brackett women left.

Abigail had thanked me for the coffee and gone inside to lie down.

I had said I'd see her soon, walked to my car, and not been able to start it.

My younger sister was seventeen when she died.

I was twenty-one. It was a winter night, and the creek on Harlow Road had flooded over the pavement.

She had been driving home from a rehearsal when the water took her car.

She called 911 from inside it, and the road was closed, and the ambulance took fifty-two minutes to get around.

I got there before it did. I was the one who pulled her out, and I held her until she was gone.

That is why I went to medical school.

It is also why, on a rainy Tuesday night, I couldn't drive past a pair of taillights in a ditch.

I had told myself I did it for the stranger.

Then I woke up on Thursday morning thinking about a woman with her leg in plaster I had no business thinking about.

Abigail Hartnell gave her dispatch report with a broken leg and blood in her eyes, and she thanked me for it.

Last night I had put my hand on her ribs and forgotten every medical thing I knew.

I was thirty-three years old and I was good at one hour of a person's life, the worst one.

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