Betrayed at the Altar, I Married a Powerful Rival novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Guardrail

That afternoon I took one of the Orsini sedans and drove to Bridgeport alone.

I wanted my own photographs of the third berth, the fill and the cracked slab, so that nobody could tell me again what the ground was like.

Federico had said to take a driver.

I had said I'd been driving myself since I was sixteen.

The shore road ran two lanes beside the water, with a steel guardrail on the seaward side and a drop of twenty feet to the rocks.

I had the window down and my phone on the passenger seat, and I was thinking about page thirty-one.

A gray flatbed truck came up behind me fast.

I watched it grow in the mirror.

It was a big truck with a white cab, and the logo on the door read Bridgeport Marine Haulage.

I knew that name.

Dario's crew used it to move crates, and every driver on it was Ruggeri's.

I eased toward the shoulder to let it pass.

The truck came up level with my door and didn't pass.

It stayed beside me, and the cab was higher than my roof.

I looked up.

The driver wore a ball cap pulled low and had both hands on the wheel.

He didn't look at me at all.

Then the cab swung left.

The steel door of the truck hit the side of the sedan, and the whole car lurched toward the water.

I stamped on the brake, and the tires screamed.

The guardrail came up in the windshield, gray and bright.

My shoulder hit the door, and the seatbelt drove across my chest and locked.

The front bumper struck the rail and the airbag burst in my face.

Everything stopped.

I sat there in a white cloud with my ears ringing.

The only thing I could think of was my parents.

I had been twelve, and a policeman in a gray coat had said the words car accident to me in a kitchen, and I had never looked at the road where it happened.

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