When I Reached the Accident Scene to Save My Biker Husband, I Found His Mistress Wearing My Tenth-Anniversary Gift for Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Helmet
Bree is dispatched to a motorcycle crash on Route 9, finds her husband Travis fine and a woman lying in the grass in the helmet she painted for him. In the hospital hallway he admits eight months, and Bree takes the helmet back from the lover, who says he painted it himself.
The dispatcher said motorcycle down on the river highway, two riders, one of them walking around.
I was in the passenger seat of the ambulance with a cold coffee, and the mile marker made my stomach drop.
It was the stretch my husband rode every Sunday morning with his club.
He had left the house at seven with his thermos and his old gray helmet.
"You know that road?" my partner asked, and he had the siren on before I answered.
"My husband rides it."
"Lots of people ride it, Bree."
I called Travis anyway.
It rang out to his voicemail, and his voice told me to leave a message.
We came around the long curve in under ten minutes, and I saw the bike in the ditch.
It was a black Harley with a dented tank.
I had rebuilt its front brakes myself last spring.
Travis was sitting on the guardrail holding his left arm against his chest.
He was gray in the face, but he was awake and he was talking.
I almost cried right there on the gravel.
"I'm fine," he said fast. "It's the shoulder. Go help her, Bree, she's worse than me."
He did not look at me when he said it.
He looked at the road.
Somewhere off in the grass a woman was screaming, and I ran toward the sound.
She lay thirty feet from the guardrail with her left leg bent wrong below the knee.
Then I saw her helmet, and my legs stopped.
Deep blue, with a ring of small gold stars around the visor.
A thin crack ran across the little gold bee near the chin strap.
I had painted that bee.
I had painted every one of those stars, over nine nights in the back of my father's shop, after closing, so Travis wouldn't find it before our anniversary.
It was supposed to be on his head in nine days.
There was a woman in it instead, and she had been riding on the back.
In ten years, Travis had never once let me sit behind him.
The frame was too short for a passenger, he always said.
My hands knew what to do before the rest of me did.
I knelt in the grass and put them on either side of her head to hold it still.
"Hey, honey," I said. "I'm Bree. I'm a paramedic. Can you tell me your name?"
"Misty."
Her eyes were wet and wide, and she was breathing fast but clean.
I leaned in to check her airway, and a smell came up from under her jacket.
Cherry and almond.
I had smelled it on his shirts since February.
He had told me it was the bartender at the clubhouse, who hugged everybody.
I had believed him.
"Please," Misty whispered. "Don't call his wife. She thinks he rode alone today."
My name tag said CALLAHAN.
Mercer was only on the marriage certificate, and Misty had no reason to read the tag.
"Stay still," I said, and my voice came out level. "I've got you."
My partner Hank was already beside me with the collar and the board.
"Her helmet comes off with two of us," he said quietly. "I'll take the head."
"No. I'll do it."
I lifted it off her myself, and I kept the bee in my palm the whole way.
I did my job, because she was a patient, and the leg was bleeding.
We splinted her and we loaded her into the back.
At the hospital I gave the report in the same voice I used for every report.
An hour later, I found Travis in the corridor outside the emergency room.
His arm was in a sling, and he had a paper cup of water he wasn't drinking.
"Bree." He tried to smile. "Thank God. They said you were on the call."
"How long have you been sleeping with her?"
He looked at the floor.
A nurse walked past us with a cart, and the wheels squeaked all the way down the hall.
"Eight months," he said. "It didn't mean anything. Let me explain."
I looked at his hand, where his ring was.
Then I took off mine and put it in the pocket of his sling.
"Explain it to the shop, then," I said. "Because I'm the one who owns it."
I walked down to bay three, because I had a handoff to sign and a helmet to collect.
It sat in a plastic bag on a chair beside Misty's bed.
I picked it up.
Misty turned her head on the pillow and smiled at me through the tears.
"You're the one who took it off me," she said. "Be careful with it, okay? He painted it himself."
"Did he."
"Nine nights," she said. "Every single star."
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